  Achieving coordination is crucial in organizational control. This paper
investigates a middle ground solution between decentralized interactions and
centralized administrations for coordinating agents beyond inefficient
behavior. We first propose the price of governance (PoG) to evaluate how such a
middle ground solution performs in terms of effectiveness and cost. We then
propose a hierarchical supervision framework to explicitly model the PoG, and
define step by step how to realize the core principle of the framework and
compute the optimal PoG for a control problem. Two illustrative case studies
are carried out to exemplify the applications of the proposed framework and its
methodology. Results show that by properly formulating and implementing each
step, the hierarchical supervision framework is capable of promoting
coordination among agents while bounding administrative cost to a minimum in
different kinds of organizational control problems.

Multiagent Systems;Artificial Intelligence