  Many definitions of business processes refer to business goals, value
creation, or profits/gains of sorts. Nevertheless, the focus of formal methods
research on business processes, like the well-known soundness property, lies on
correctness with regards to execution semantics of modeling languages. Among
others, soundness requires proper completion of process instances. However, the
question of whether participants have any interest in working towards
completion (or in participating in the process) has not been addressed as of
yet.
  In this work, we investigate whether inter-organizational business processes
give participants incentives for achieving the common business goals---in
short, whether incentives are aligned with the process. In particular, fair
behavior should pay off and efficient completion of tasks should be rewarded.
We propose a game-theoretic approach that relies on algorithms for solving
stochastic games from the machine learning community. We describe a method for
checking incentive alignment of process models with utility annotations for
tasks, which can be used for a priori analysis of inter-organizational business
processes. Last but not least, we show that the soundness property corresponds
to a special case of incentive alignment.
