Knowledge Sharing Model and its Implication on Knowledge Categorization and Management

Recently, Knowledge Management (KM) has been applied to business management practice. Surprisingly, there are few studies that address the most fundamental problem in KM: people may prefer not to share their knowledge in order to preserve their intellectual or proprietary values in the organization. Without the premise of each individual’s willingness to share knowledge, there will be no valuable input for the information-technology system and thus no knowledge management at all. This paper aims to model the behavioral dynamics of knowledge sharing and to design an incentive system that may facilitate knowledge sharing. In this paper, a game-theory based model is developed, and the framework for designing an incentive system is proposed according to the model.