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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Source code can be found at https://github.com/abira-sengupta/casp-Plain_Plateau_2021.
- 3.
While we currently use the Nash equilibrium of these games to create these expectations, in principle they could be learned from experience.
- 4.
In this paper, we do not consider possible mechanisms for such a \(norm \) to emerge, but instead assume it holds initially.
- 5.
This requires a slight extension of our expectation language to allow an actor to be named in a happ term.
References
Axelrod, R.: An evolutionary approach to norms. Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 80(4), 1095–1111 (1986)
Bicchieri, C., Muldoon, R., Sontuoso, A.: Social norms. In: Zalta, E.N. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, winter 2018 edn. (2018)
Booth, A.L.: The free rider problem and a social custom model of trade union membership. Q. J. Econ. 100(1), 253–261 (1985)
Castelfranchi, C.: Mind as an anticipatory device: for a theory of expectations. In: De Gregorio, M., Di Maio, V., Frucci, M., Musio, C. (eds.) BVAI 2005. LNCS, vol. 3704, pp. 258–276. Springer, Heidelberg (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/11565123_26
Cranefield, S.: Agents and expectations. In: Balke, T., Dignum, F., van Riemsdijk, M.B., Chopra, A.K. (eds.) COIN 2013. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 8386, pp. 234–255. Springer, Cham (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07314-9_13
Cranefield, S., Clark-Younger, H., Hay, G.: A collective action simulation platform. In: Paolucci, M., Sichman, J.S., Verhagen, H. (eds.) MABS 2019. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 12025, pp. 69–80. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60843-9_6
Dal Bó, P., Fréchette, G.R.: Strategy choice in the infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma. Am. Econ. Rev. 109(11), 3929–52 (2019)
Dawes, R.M.: Social dilemmas. Ann. Rev. Psychol. 31(1), 169–193 (1980)
del Corral de Felipe, M.: The role of commitment in the explanation of agency: From practical reasoning to collective action. Ph.D. thesis, National University of Distance Education (UNED), Spain (2012)
Geanakoplos, J., Pearce, D., Stacchetti, E.: Psychological games and sequential rationality. Games Econ. Behav. 1(1), 60–79 (1989)
Hardin, R., Cullity, G.: The free rider problem. In: Zalta, E.N. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2013)
Holt, C.A., Roth, A.E.: The Nash equilibrium: a perspective. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 101(12), 3999–4002 (2004)
Holzinger, K.: The problems of collective action: a new approach. MPI Collective Goods Preprint No. 2003/2, SSRN (2003). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.399140
Klein, D.B.: The microfoundations of rules vs. discretion. Const. Polit. Econ. 1(3), 1–19 (1990)
Kowalski, R., Sergot, M.: A logic-based calculus of events. In: Foundations of Knowledge Base Management, pp. 23–55. Springer, Heidelberg (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83397-7_2
Lecouteux, G.: What does “we” want? Team reasoning, game theory, and unselfish behaviours. Revue d’Économie Politique 128(3), 311–332 (2018)
Lee, B.H., Struben, J., Bingham, C.B.: Collective action and market formation: an integrative framework. Strat. Manag. J. 39(1), 242–266 (2018)
Mueller, E.T.: Commonsense Reasoning. Morgan Kaufmann, Boston (2006)
North, M.J., et al.: Complex adaptive systems modeling with Repast Simphony. Complex Adapt. Syst. Model. 1(1), 3 (2013)
Olson, M.: The Theory of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1965)
Ostrom, E.: Collective action and the evolution of social norms. J. Econ. Perspect. 14(3), 137–158 (2000)
Ostrom, E.: Analyzing collective action. Agric. Econ. 41, 155–166 (2010)
Ostrom, E., Ahn, T.K.: Foundations of social capital (2003)
Peters, H.: Game Theory: A Multi-leveled Approach. Springer, Heidelberg (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69291-1
Petruzzi, P.E., Busquets, D., Pitt, J.: Social capital as a complexity reduction mechanism for decision making in large scale open systems. In: 2014 IEEE Eighth International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, pp. 145–150. IEEE (2014)
Ranathunga, S., Purvis, M., Cranefield, S.: Integrating expectation handling into Jason (2011)
Reuben, E.: The Evolution of Theories of Collective Action. MPhil thesis, Tinbergen Institute (2003)
Shanahan, M.: The event calculus explained. In: Wooldridge, M.J., Veloso, M. (eds.) Artificial Intelligence Today. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 1600, pp. 409–430. Springer, Heidelberg (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48317-9_17
Sugden, R.: The logic of team reasoning. Phil. Explor. 6(3), 165–181 (2003)
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Marsden Fund Council from New Zealand Government funding, managed by Royal Society Te Apārangi.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sengupta, A., Cranefield, S., Pitt, J. (2022). Solving Social Dilemmas by Reasoning About Expectations. In: Theodorou, A., Nieves, J.C., De Vos, M. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms, and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems XIV. COINE 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13239. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16617-4_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16617-4_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-16616-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-16617-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)