Abstract
When individuals share resources, they may have to make decisions that don’t always maximize their benefits. Unfortunately, some people may have selfish attitudes, which can result in unfair situations that reduce the overall benefits for everyone. One alternative solution to this problem is cooperation. In this approach, individuals give up some benefits to benefit the group. This attitude is heavily influenced by the human values of the individuals involved and can impact the decision-making process. This paper examines how an agent’s behaviour in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma game, as provided by game theory, can be influenced by Schwartz’s ten basic values theory. The experiments show that when the agent follows Schwartz’s order of preferences for values, it tends to take cooperative actions. On the other hand, when the agent prioritizes values associated with individualism, it results in low overall benefits.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by grant VAE: TED2021-131295B-C33 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by the “European Union NextGeneration EU/PRTR”, by grant COSASS: PID2021-123673OB-C32 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”, and by the AGROBOTS Project of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos funded by the Community of Madrid, Spain. Marcelo Karanik has been granted funding by the Spanish Ministry of Universities for the Requalification of the Spanish University System (María Zambrano) 2021–2023 through Rey Juan Carlos University.
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Pina-Zapata, A., García-Rodriguez, S., Karanik, M. (2025). Value-Aligned Decisions in Cooperative Environments. In: González-Briones, A., et al. Highlights in Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Digital Twins: The PAAMS Collection. PAAMS 2024. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 2149. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-73058-0_7
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