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A Flexi Partner Selection Model for the Emergence of Cooperation in N-person Social Dilemmas

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Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13824))

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Abstract

There has been extensive research on social dilemmas. Many models and mechanisms have been proposed to promote cooperation. In this work, we propose a three-stage social dilemma game, the Flexi Partner Selection (FPS) mechanism that can promote cooperative behaviour among agents that are trained to maximize an absolutely selfish objective function. Compared with previous works, our settings are more general and flexible as the number of players in each game is not fixed. Specifically, agents can vote out players based on their past behaviours or stay out of the game if playing the game makes them worse off. Moreover, we consider social dilemmas with both linear and non-linear payoffs. Using reinforcement learning (RL), self-interested agents are able to learn to punish defectors by consistently excluding them and cooperate with others in a number of different settings.

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Correspondence to Bo An .

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Gu, T., An, B. (2023). A Flexi Partner Selection Model for the Emergence of Cooperation in N-person Social Dilemmas. In: Yokoo, M., Qiao, H., Vorobeychik, Y., Hao, J. (eds) Distributed Artificial Intelligence. DAI 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13824. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25549-6_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25549-6_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-25548-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-25549-6

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