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Social Motives and Social Contracts in Cooperative Survival Games

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Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms, and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems XV (COINE 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13549))

Abstract

Cooperative survival games are a sub-class of resource competition games wherein self-interest appears to be the rational choice in the short-term, but if every ‘player’ always acts out of self-interest, extinction is guaranteed in the long-term. The situation is dramatised in the film The Platform (El Hoyo); in this paper, we implement a self-organising multi-agent system that approximately recreates the cooperative survival game depicted in this film. In a series of experiments, we investigate how communication, a pre-existing tendency to sociality (characterised by social motives) and a capacity for social construction (characterised by social contracts) enables a collective of random individuals to establish a stable institution that increases their overall life expectancy. The experimental results provide some insight into how a pro-social personality and the ability to bootstrap institutions enable a random collective to find a psychologically and sociologically plausible solution to what is effectively a cooperative survival game merged with Rawl’s Veil of Ignorance.

Supported by Imperial College London and the Swiss Study Foundation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is, for example, not possible for an agent to sign a treaty asking it to take 5 food, when it has already signed a treaty requesting it to take 0 food.

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Acknowledgements

We are particularly grateful to the three anonymous reviewers whose many insightful comments helped to revise and improve the presentation of this work. The experiments reported in this paper have used the Imperial College London 2021–22 SOMAS Cohort’s engine, and many thanks to everyone involved in the creation of this platform (sic).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Imperial College London, London, SW7 2BX, UK

    Matthew Scott, Mathieu Dubied & Jeremy Pitt

  2. ETH Zürich, 8092, Zürich, Switzerland

    Mathieu Dubied

Authors
  1. Matthew Scott
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  2. Mathieu Dubied
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  3. Jeremy Pitt
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jeremy Pitt .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Nirav Ajmeri

  2. University of Bath, Bath, UK

    Andreasa Morris Martin

  3. University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu

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Scott, M., Dubied, M., Pitt, J. (2022). Social Motives and Social Contracts in Cooperative Survival Games. In: Ajmeri, N., Morris Martin, A., Savarimuthu, B.T.R. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms, and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems XV. COINE 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13549. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20845-4_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20845-4_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-20844-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-20845-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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