TITLE:
Managing Urban Complexity through Decision Coordination
AUTHORS:
Shih-Kung Lai
KEYWORDS:
Plans, Administration, Regulations, Governance, Urban Complexity
JOURNAL NAME:
Modern Economy,
Vol.11 No.2,
February
5,
2020
ABSTRACT: The purpose of the paper is to identify conceptually
effective action modes for coordinating decisions, given a scope of interdependent
decisions. More specifically, the paper addresses a fundamental question about coordinating
decisions: given a finite set of decisions, how should we coordinate these decisions
through plans, administration, regulations, and governance? To address the question,
we analyze axiomatically structures of decisions through binary relations. There
are four types of such relations, namely, dependence, independence or converse of
dependence, mutual dependence, and mutual independence. Each relation constitutes
an ordering with associated properties. Structural characteristics of the four types
of relations can be investigated. A scope of coordinating decisions is defined as
the transitive closure of a binary relation and a coordination mode is defined as
the choice function within the scope through which the coordination mode results
in the best outcome. Possible extensions of the conceptual framework are discussed.