Software development involves teams of interconnected individuals who are encouraged to work collectively in a knowledge and communication network to produce software artifacts. At the social level, the interactions of these participants and their ability to cooperate are important for improving the productivity of teams and organizations. Soft- ware development is a knowledge and human intensive activity. It is therefore not surprising to discover that recent contributions in software development have repeatedly asserted the critical role of people in software development efforts. However, existing approaches to software development fail to fully exploit the importance of social and intellectual capital that has been highlighted in the fields of economics and sociology. Leveraging the existing approaches from economics and sociology and applying to software development can assist software organizations in maximizing their return on investment. For example, by applying one such approach, mechanism design, we can improve and model the organization’s total productivity based on social aspects affecting productivity (i.e. social productivity). Social productivity involves targeting the quality of social interactions in order to bring about productivity improvements. Furthermore, by optimizing the social structure and welfare of a software organization, we aim to improve soft- ware team collaboration, and maximize the team productivity.