The Origins of the Deadline: Optimizing Communication in Organizations

In this paper, we introduce a model of communication in hierarchies which is driven by the costof being interrupted when receiving a message, rather than the usual bandwidth constraints. Weshow that in a queueing model with a simple hierarchy, the ability to schedule periodic messagetransmissions in the absence of global information makes the performance of the model close tooptimal.Keywords: Markov Decision Processes, network communication, organization theory, queueingtheory1...