March 14-15, 2016, Trento - Italy

(co-located with VMBO 2016)

The service economy is undoubtedly posing new challenges to our understanding of the basics of social interaction, including the very notion of economic value. Indeed, despite the notion of value has always raised the interest of economists, and many definitions have been proposed, it has always remained rather elusive and difficult to capture. This picture has been complicated by the rise of service economy, which has shifted the focus from the company’s perspective to the customer’s perspective, where value is co-created in the interaction between the provider and the customer. Value co-creation is also at the core of the sharing economy, which poses further challenges to the theory of economic exchange.

But what does it mean to create – or co-create – value? How, when, where is value created? And what is economic value, after all? What are the mechanisms of value ascription? Are there differences between ascribing value to a good or to a service? What about the value of ownership in the sharing economy? And in general, what does it mean to ascribe value an object, an action, a commitment, a relationship? How does value ascription depend on contextual aspects, such as possession or scarcity of resources? How may multiple value ascriptions related to different contexts interact, originating a notion of cumulative value?

These appear to be genuine ontological questions, centred around the nature of economic value. Addressing these questions is important not only from the theoretical point of view, but also to build better computer-based models of complex socio-technical systems, where value modeling plays a crucial role. Only understanding value mechanisms we can aim at integrating in a transparent way the business perspective with the organizational perspective and the process perspective, with the ultimate goal of enabling a better governance of our society.

So this workshop is primarily addressed to those who are interested in the ontology of social reality for modeling purposes, but more in general to anybody who is interested in the foundations of economic value. The workshop will consist of invited presentations given by worldwide experts from very different disciplines, including philosophy, economics, accounting, business management, and information systems. Participation is open to anybody, but registration is required.

Public / Private sector