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Solving Social Dilemmas by Reasoning About Expectations
Abstract
It has been argued that one role of social constructs, such as institutions, trust and norms, is to coordinate the expectations of autonomous entities in order to resolve collective action situations (such as collective risk dilemmas) through the coordination of behaviour. While much work has addressed the formal representation of these social constructs, in this paper we focus specifically on the formal representation of, and associated reasoning with, the expectations themselves. In particular, we investigate how explicit reasoning about expectations can be used to encode both traditional game theory solution concepts and social mechanisms for the social dilemma situation. We use the Collective Action Simulation Platform (CASP) to model a collective risk dilemma based on a flood plain scenario and show how using expectations in the reasoning mechanisms of the agents making decisions supports the choice of cooperative behaviour.
Achieving social order in societies of self-interested autonomous agents is a difficult problem due to lack of trust in the actions of others and the temptation to seek rewards at the expense of others. In human society, social norms play a strong role in fostering cooperative behaviour—as long as the value of cooperation and the cost of defection are understood by a large proportion of society. Prior work has shown the importance of both norms and metanorms (requiring punishment of defection) to produce and maintain norm-compliant behaviour in a society, e.g. as in Axelrod’s approach of learning of individual behavioural characteristics of boldness and vengefulness. However, much of this work (including Axelrod’s) uses simplified simulation scenarios in which norms are implicit in the code or are represented as simple bit strings, which limits the practical application of these methods for agents that interact across a range of real-world scenarios with complex norms. This work presents a generalisation of Axelrod’s approach in which norms are explicitly represented and agents can choose their actions after performing what-if reasoning using a version of the event calculus that tracks the creation, fulfilment and violation of expectations. This approach allows agents to continually learn and apply their boldness and vengefulness parameters across multiple scenarios with differing norms. The approach is illustrated using Axelrod’s scenario as well as a social dilemma from the behavioural game theory literature.
This editorial presents the main contributions of the theory of team reasoning in game theory, and the issues that remain to be solved before this theory could become a credible alternative to "orthodox" game theory. I argue in particular that an approach based on collective agency rather than rational choice theory and social preferences offer a scientifically preferable theory of unselfish behaviours, both in terms of parsimony and empirical validation. I review the economic literature on team reasoning, and highlight the contributions of the papers of the present volume to tackle the open issues of the theory of team reasoning.
Research Summary : While extant research recognizes the importance of collective action for market formation, it provides little understanding about when and to what extent collective action is important. In this article, we develop a novel theoretical framework detailing what collective action problems and solutions arise in market formation and under what conditions. Our framework centers on the development of market infrastructure with three key factors that influence the nature and extent of collective action problems: perceived returns to contributions, excludability, and contribution substitutability. We apply our framework to diverse market formation contexts and derive a set of attendant propositions. Finally, we show how collective action problems and solutions evolve during market formation efforts and discuss how our framework contributes to strategic management, entrepreneurship, and organization literatures.
Managerial Summary : This article lays out the key considerations that players operating in new markets should contemplate when making nontrivial investments in those spaces. As collective action problems can thwart efforts to establish new markets, we ask: When and under what conditions should market players collaborate rather than act independently? And if players collaborate, how should they coordinate to establish a new market? To address these research questions, we develop a novel generalizable framework of collective action in market formation. Our framework assesses the presence and type of collective action problems that hinder market formation and identifies potential solutions tied to those collective action problems.
The Department of Information Science is one of seven departments that make up the School of Business at the University of Otago. The department offers courses of study leading to a major in Information Science within the BCom, BA and BSc degrees. In addition to undergraduate teaching, the department is also strongly involved in postgraduate research programmes leading to MCom, MA, MSc and PhD degrees. Research projects in spatial information processing, connectionist-based information systems , software engineering and software development, information engineering and database, software metrics, distributed information systems, multimedia information systems and information systems security are particularly well supported. Abstract. Although expectations play an important role in designing cognitive agents, agent expectations are not explicitly being handled in most common agent programming environments. There are techniques for monitoring fulfilment and violation of agent expectations, however they are not linked with common agent programming environments so that agents can be easily programmed to respond to these circumstances. This paper investigates how expectation monitoring tools can be tightly integrated with the Jason BDI agent interpreter by extending it with built-in actions to initiate and terminate monitoring of expectations, and demonstrates how an external expectation monitor is linked with Jason using these internal actions.
Purpose
This paper is to describe development of the features and functions of Repast Simphony, the widely used, free, and open source agent-based modeling environment that builds on the Repast 3 library. Repast Simphony was designed from the ground up with a focus on well-factored abstractions. The resulting code has a modular architecture that allows individual components such as networks, logging, and time scheduling to be replaced as needed. The Repast family of agent-based modeling software has collectively been under continuous development for more than 10 years.
Method
Includes reviewing other free and open-source modeling libraries and environments as well as describing the architecture of Repast Simphony. The architectural description includes a discussion of the Simphony application framework, the core module, ReLogo, data collection, the geographical information system, visualization, freeze drying, and third party application integration.
Results
Include a review of several Repast Simphony applications and brief tutorial on how to use Repast Simphony to model a simple complex adaptive system.
Conclusions
We discuss opportunities for future work, including plans to provide support for increasingly large-scale modeling efforts.
Explaining collective action is still one of the most challenging problems for the social sciences. The purpose of this paper is to describe how the main ideas on the subject have evolved over the years and additionally, to illustrate how our understanding of the problem has grown. It starts by describing perhaps the most influential model in the literature, namely Olson's model of collective action. Later on, it uses the same model to relate six essentially different approaches to solve the collective action problem; for each, highlighting their contributions to our general understanding as well as their main drawbacks. I conclude by stressing the fact that we still do not have a satisfactory theory of collective action. However, recent work is described which uses cognitively and emotionally bounded agents and promises to deliver significant improvements.
This work is about the central role of "expectations" in mental life and in purposive action. We will present a cognitive anatomy of expectations, their reduction in terms of more elementary ingredients: beliefs and goals. Moreover, those ingredients will be considered in their 'quantitative' dimension: the value of the Goal, the strength of the Beliefs. We will base several predictions on this analytical distinction, and sketch a theory of hope, fear, frustration, disappointment, and relief, strictly derived from the analysis of expectations. Eventually, we will discuss how we can capture the global subjective character of such mental states that we have decomposed; how to account for their gestaltic nature. 'More geometrico demonstrata' Spinoza
In social dilemma situations, each individual always receives a higher payoff for defecting than for cooperating, but all are better off if all cooperate than if all defect. Often, however, people in social dilemmas attend more to the group's payoffs than to their own, either automatically or to behave “appropriately.” But whereas social identity elicits cooperative behaviour in dilemmas, it is generally only for the benefit of an “in-group.” Dilemmas between groups (requiring self-sacrificial behaviour within) are often the most extreme. Consequently, the framing and manipulation of group identity is critical to cooperation rate as demonstrated by careful laboratory experimentation. Dans les situations de dilemme social, il est plus rentable pour chaque individu de démissionner que de coopérer, mais tous s'en trouvent mieux si tous coopèrent que s'ils démissionnent. Cependant, les personnes aux prises avec des dilemmes sociaux considèrent davantage les retombées pour le groupe que pour elles-mêmes, de façon automatique ou pour se comporter de façon correcte. Bien que l'identification sociale favorise le comportement coopératif en situation de dilemme, cela ne vaut que pour le groupe d'appartenance. Les dilemmes entre groupes (qui requièrent le sacrifice de soi à l'intérieur du groupe) sont souvent les plus extrêmes. Des expériences en laboratoire montrent que l'encadrement et la manipulation de l'identification au groupe affectent fortement le taux de coopération.
This article presents the event calculus, a logic-based formalism for representing actions and their effects. A circumscriptive solution to the frame problem is deployed which reduces to monotonic predicate completion. Using a number of benchmark examples from the literature, the formalism is shown to apply to a variety of domains, including those featuring actions with indirect effects, actions with non-deterministic effects, concurrent actions, and continuous change. Introduction Central to many complex computer programs that take decisions about how they or other agents should act is some form of representation of the effects of actions, both their own and those of other agents. To the extent that the design of such programs is to be based on sound engineering principles, rather than ad hoc methods, it's vital that the subject of how actions and their effects are represented has a solid theoretical basis. Hence the need for logical formalisms for representing action, which, a...
In this paper, we discuss some types of expectation that contribute to the behaviour of social agents, and investigate the role that these social expectations can play in the resolution of collective action problems. We describe our Collective Action Simulation Platform (CASP), a framework that allows us to integrate the Java-based Repast Simphony platform with a Prolog-based event calculus interpreter. This allows us to run simulations of agents who make reference to social expectations when reasoning about which actions to perform. We demonstrate the use of CASP in modelling a simple scenario involving agents in a collective action problem, showing that agents who are informed by social expectations can be led to cooperative behaviour that would otherwise be considered “non-rational”.
We use a novel experimental design to reliably elicit subjects’ strategies in an infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma experiment with perfect monitoring. We find that three simple strategies repre‑ sent the majority of the chosen strategies: Always Defect, Tit‑for‑Tat, and Grim. In addition, we identify how the strategies systematically vary with the parameters of the game. Finally, we use the elicited strategies to test the ability to recover strategies using statistical methods based on observed round‑by‑round cooperation choices and find that this can be done fairly well, but only under certain conditions. (JEL C72, C73, C92)
To endow computers with common sense is one of the major long-term goals of Artificial Intelligence research. One approach to this problem is to formalize commonsense reasoning using mathematical logic. Commonsense Reasoning is a detailed, high-level reference on logic-based commonsense reasoning. It uses the event calculus, a highly powerful and usable tool for commonsense reasoning, which Erik T. Mueller demonstrates as the most effective tool for the broadest range of applications. He provides an up-to-date work promoting the use of the event calculus for commonsense reasoning, and bringing into one place information scattered across many books and papers. Mueller shares the knowledge gained in using the event calculus and extends the literature with detailed event calculus solutions to problems that span many areas of the commonsense world.
This paper discusses the role that expectations have in agent reasoning, and focuses on the author’s previous work on modelling and monitoring expectations with a complex temporal structure, and its application to expectation monitoring in virtual worlds. It also presents a proposal for a new extension of this work by integrating it with the event calculus to simplify the definition of institutions with actions that create expectations. It is shown how this “expectation event calculus” could provide a uniform basis for reasoning about various types of expectation, and commitments and norms in particular.
“Free riding,” used as a descriptive term, refers to taking a jointly produced benefit without contributing towards its production. Used as a term of criticism, it refers to the wrongful failure to contribute towards the joint production of benefits that one receives. On either usage, the central interest of moral philosophy in free riding is the same: to specify the conditions under which not contributing towards the joint production of benefits that one receives is wrong, and to explain why.
We outline an approach for reasoning about events and time within a logic programming framework. The notion of event is taken to be more primitive than that of time and both are represented explicitly by means of Horn clauses augmented with negation by failure. The main intended applications are the updating of databases and narrative understanding. In contrast with conventional databases which assume that updates are made in the same order as the corresponding events occur in the real world, the explicit treatment of events allows us to deal with updates which provide new information about the past. Default reasoning on the basis of incomplete information is obtained as a consequence of using negation by failure. Default conclusions are automatically withdrawn if the addition of new information renders them inconsistent. Because events are differentiated from times, we can represent events with unknown times, as well as events which are partially ordered and concurrent.
A common requirement of distributed multi-agent systems is for the agents themselves to negotiate pairwise agreements on performing a joint action. In systems with endogenous resources, the cost of computing the decision-making has to be taken into account. If the computational resources expended in negotiating an optimal solution exceed the marginal benefits gained from that negotiation, then it would be more expedient and efficient to use the memory of past interactions to short-cut the complexity of decision-making in joint or collective actions of this kind. In social systems, it has been observed that social capital is an attribute of individuals that enhances their ability to solve collective action problems. In this paper, we define a new computational framework for representing and reasoning about electronic social capital, in which actions enhance or diminish three different forms of social capital (individual trustworthiness, social network, and institutions), and a decision-making model which uses social capital to decide whether to cooperate or defect in strategic games. A set of scenarios are presented where we believe that social capital can support effective collective action sustained over time, avoid suboptimal dominant strategies, and short-cut the computational costs involved in repetitious solving of strategic games.
We use a novel experimental design to identify the strategies used by subjects in an infinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma experiment. We ask subjects to design strategies that will play in their place. We find that the strategy elicitation has negligible effects on behavior supporting the validity of this method. We study the strategies chosen by the subjects and find that they include some commonly mentioned strategies, such as tit-for-tat and Grim trigger. However, other strategies which are thought to have some desirable properties, such as win-stay-lose-shift are not prevalent. The results indicate that what strategy is used to support cooperation changes with the parameters of the game. Finally, our results confirm that long run miss-coordination can arise. We are grateful to Jim Andreoni, Drew Fudenberg, and seminar participants at UCSD at the Conference on Social Dilemmas (Rice 2010) for very useful comments. We thank Emanuel Vespa for his research assistance, CASSEL (UCLA) and SSEL (Caltech) for the Multistage software as well as Rajeev Advani for its adaptation. Fréchette gratefully acknowledges the support of NSF via grant SES-0924780 as well as support from the Center for Experimental Social Science (CESS), and the C.V. Starr Center. Dal Bó gratefully acknowledges the support of NSF via grant SES-0720753. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF.
Orthodox decision theory presupposes that agency is invested in individuals. An opposing literature allows team agency to be invested in teams whose members use distinctive modes of team reasoning. This paper offers a new conceptual framework, inspired by David Lewis's analysis of common reasons for belief, within which team reasoning can be represented. It shows how individuals can independently endorse a principle of team reasoning which prescribes acting as a team member conditional on assurance that others have endorsed the same principle. It argues that there can be such assurance even when no individual has an obligation to act on team reasoning.*This paper originated in a lecture that I gave at a Colloquium on Collective Intentions at Erasmus University Rotterdam. I thank participants, and particularly Govert den Hartogh, for comments. The analysis presented in this paper is an offshoot of a larger project, which uses David Lewis's work as the starting point for a reconstruction of the foundations of game theory. That project is joint work with Robin Cubitt. The specific idea of using this approach to analyse team reasoning grew out of a discussion with Michael Bratman. My work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust.
Collective-action problems pervade all societies as well as ecological systems used by humans. Substantial evidence has accrued during the last several decades that human actors are able to solve some (but definitely not all) collective-action problems on their own without external rules and enforcement imposed from the outside. In this article, I review some of the structural variables that have been found to affect the likelihood of collective action. Then, I address the need to base future work on collective action on a more general theory of human behavior than has been used to model collective action over the last five decades. In the last section, I discuss how structural variables affect the core relationships of reputation, trust, and reciprocity as these affect levels of cooperation. Copyright (c) 2010 International Association of Agricultural Economists.
Using anN-person model, I explore the microfoundations of benevolent rules-dominant situations (of which the familiar time inconsistency
models are examples). I show that under discretion the citizens confront a prisoner's dilemma, and I discuss the similar dilemmas
embedded in the time inconsistency models. I then suggest new solutions to benevolent rules dominance: suboptimality can be
avoided by accepting the discretionary regime and applying to the citizen population the standard remedies to the prisoner's
dilemma.
In psychological games the payoff to each player depends not only on what every player does but also on what he thinks every player believes, and on what he thinks they believe others believe, and so on. In equilibrium, beliefs are assumed to correspond to reality. Yet psychological games and psychological equilibria allow one to model belief-dependent emotions such as anger and surprise that are problematic for conventional game theory. We are particularly interested in issues of sequential rationality for psychological games. We show that although backward induction cannot be applied, and “perfect” psychological equilibria may not exist, subgame perfect and sequential equilibria always do exist.
Norms provide a powerful mechanism for regulating conflict in groups, even when there are more than two people and no central authority. This paper investigates the emergence and stability of behavioral norms in the context of a game played by people of limited rationality. The dynamics of this new norms game are analyzed with a computer simulation based upon the evolutionary principle that strategies shown to be relatively effective will be used more in the future than less effective strategies. The results show the conditions under which norms can evolve and prove stable. One interesting possibility is the employment of metanorms, the willingness to punish someone who did not enforce a norm. Many historical examples of domestic and international norms are used to illustrate the wide variety of mechanisms that can support norms, including metanorms, dominance, internalization, deterrence, social proof, membership in groups, law, and reputation .
The problem of collective action is usually identified with social dilemmas. A wider notion of the term collective action problem is introduced, as dilemmas are not the only problems to arise in collective action. The article first presents a typology of collective action problems based on matrix game analysis. Five types are distinguished: distribution, defection, co-ordination, disagreement, and instability problems. Second, the article discusses a number of proposals how to resolve these types of collective action problems, such as altruism, norms, focal points, correlated strategies, collective decision-making, external power, and sanctioning. Whereas the "political" solutions can be used to resolve all types of problems, the "motivational" solutions can only facilitate the resolution of some of the problems, and the "rational expectation" solutions can solve some types and help to solve others.
In 1950, John Nash contributed a remarkable one-page PNAS article that defined and characterized a notion of equilibrium for n- person games. This notion, now called the "Nash equilibrium," has been widely applied and adapted in economics and other behavioral sciences. Indeed, game theory, with the Nash equilibrium as its centerpiece, is becoming the most prominent unifying theory of social science. In this perspective, we summarize the historical context and subsequent impact of Nash's contribution.
I assume multiple types of players--"rational egoists," as well as "conditional cooperators" and "willing punishers"--in models of nonmarket behavior. I use an indirect evolutionary approach to explain how multiple types of players could survive and flourish in social dilemma situations. Contextual variables that enhance knowledge about past behavior assist in explaining the origin of collective action. Among the important contextual variables are types of goods, types of groups, and rules that groups use to provide and allocate goods. Finally, I reexamine a series of design principles that were derived earlier from an examination of extensive case materials.
The role of commitment in the explanation of agency: From practical reasoning to collective action
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The free rider problem
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Hardin, R., Cullity, G.: The free rider problem. In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. E. N. Zalta, Ed. (2013)
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Ostrom, E., Ahn., T.K.: Foundations of social capital (2003)