Abstract
Some cooperative survival situations require all members of a group to participate equally in collective action; however, if the only sanction for non-participatory free-riding is exclusion, then it can be ineffective, as exclusion is indistinguishable from non-participation. The question then is: how does a group, that can define a set of mutually agreed conventional rules, incentivise participation that supports collective survival when the only sanctioning instrument is exclusion. This problem is investigated in this paper through the design and implementation of a self-organising multi-agent simulator for an iterated cooperative survival game. A series of experiments, or ‘survival trials’, is run for three different sanctioning schemes: fixed-length, dynamic-length and graduated-length exclusion. Results show that graduated sanctions outperform the alternatives, which can be either too weak or too strong. We conclude by arguing that these results provide evidence for why graduated sanctions are the basis for one of the principles of self-governing institutions.
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We are particularly grateful to the members of the SOMAS team at Imperial College London, specifically, Neel Dugar and Rasvan Rusu for developing a robust infrastructure, as well as Sacha Hakim and Michal Makowka for their contribution to the agent specification.
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Blackledge, B. et al. (2023). Incentivising Participation with Exclusionary Sanctions (Full). In: Fornara, N., Cheriyan, J., Mertzani, A. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms, and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems XVI. COINE 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14002. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49133-7_3
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