GALOIS, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: HR001121S0007-30

Description

The vision of the CAMDEN project has been to explore the use of mechanism design as a solution to effectively incentivize and accelerate collaboration in critical DoD domains. Our Phase II goal is to “make it real” by building one or more deployable mechanism design solutions, demonstrating in a very tangible way how mechanism design can benefit the DoD. In the 8-month Phase 1 effort, we aimed to provide clarity on the fundamental questions and issues involved in mechanism design, evidence of the feasibility of our approach, and a roadmap for further research leading to deployable API mechanisms for the DoD.  We characterize a mechanism design solution as having three components: a domain and domain objective; an incentive structure to achieve that objective; and a platform for instantiating the incentive structure.  The three components serve not only as a useful way to organize some of our key insights from Phase I of CAMDEN, but as the specification of research thrusts for Phase II, for example, applying behavioral economics, taking into account social norms, and applying temporal dynamics to incentive structures.   An important design principle that comes from our Phase I research is that the specific details matter in mechanism design, and so solutions to these problems depend on getting the precise right fit between domain, incentive structure, and platform.  Our work in Phase II is meant to demonstrate the plausibility of this claim by taking three specific DoD problem domains (information sharing, supply chain, DoD acquisition), and showing how to instantiate a solution with the appropriate incentive structure and platform.  Our plan is to carry out multiple proof-of-concept instantiations that illuminate the value of each of the Phase I findings above, while demonstrating the potential for DoD deployment of these solutions. Our goal beyond Phase II is to demonstrate the feasibility of mechanism design solutions for applications at DoD-scale.  So a key outcome of the CAMDEN project is ultimately a toolbox of mechanism design components, design patterns, and tools for implementing these patterns that can be widely applied across multiple DoD domains of interest.