Abstract
Upon starting a collective endeavour, it is important to understand your partners’ preferences and how strongly they commit to a common goal. Establishing a prior commitment or agreement in terms of posterior benefits and consequences from those engaging in it provides an important mechanism for securing cooperation. Resorting to methods from Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT), here we analyse how prior commitments can also be adopted as a tool for enhancing coordination when its outcomes exhibit an asymmetric payoff structure, in both pairwise and multi-party interactions. Arguably, coordination is more complex to achieve than cooperation since there might be several desirable collective outcomes in a coordination problem (compared to mutual cooperation, the only desirable collective outcome in cooperation dilemmas). Our analysis, both analytically and via numerical simulations, shows that whether prior commitment would be a viable evolutionary mechanism for enhancing coordination and the overall population social welfare strongly depends on the collective benefit and severity of competition, and more importantly, how asymmetric benefits are resolved in a commitment deal. Moreover, in multi-party interactions, prior commitments prove to be crucial when a high level of group diversity is required for optimal coordination. The results are robust for different selection intensities. Overall, our analysis provides new insights into the complexity and beauty of behavioural evolution driven by humans’ capacity for commitment, as well as for the design of self-organised and distributed multi-agent systems for ensuring coordination among autonomous agents.
Highlights
Achieving a collective endeavour among individuals with their own personal interest is an important social and economic challenge in various societies (Barrett, 2016; Hardin, 1968; Ostrom, 1990; Pitt et al, 2012; Sigmund, 2010)
The same argument is applied to other pairwise and multi-player social dilemmas such as the Stag-Hunt and Chicken games, since the nature of the games is different from the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) and Public Goods Game (PGG), mutual cooperation is the only desirable outcome to be achieved
We extend the model allowing players to have the option to arrange a prior commitment before a tech adoption (TD) interaction
Summary
Achieving a collective endeavour among individuals with their own personal interest is an important social and economic challenge in various societies (Barrett, 2016; Hardin, 1968; Ostrom, 1990; Pitt et al, 2012; Sigmund, 2010). Chen et al, 2014; Cimpeanu et al, 2019; Martinez-Vaquero et al, 2015, 2017; Powers et al, 2012; Sasaki et al, 2015; Szolnoki & Perc, 2012; Wang et al, 2019), allowing one to efficiently avoid free-riders (Han & Lenaerts, 2016; Han, Santos, et al, 2015) and resolve the antisocial punishment problem (Han, 2016) These works have primarily focused on modelling prior commitments for improving mutual cooperation among self-interested agents. C. Santos et al, 2006; Skyrms, 2003) In other contexts such as coordination problems, this is not the case anymore since there might be multiple optimal or desirable collective outcomes and players might have distinct, incompatible preferences regarding which outcome a mutual agreement should aim to achieve (e.g. due to asymmetric benefits). Results of the analysis and a final discussion will follow
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