Institutional choice in social dilemmas: An experimental approach

This paper presents an experimental study on the ability of human groups to escape the tragedy of the commons through institutional change. It shows that the groups identify institutional change as a means of resolving social dilemmas and are ready to apply it even if the change requires an unanimous vote. At the same time, the groups who were given the right to change the rules performed poorer on average than the control-groups. This result stands in contradiction to elementary economic reasoning as well as the results of previous experimental studies. --social dilemmas,common pool resource,laboratory experiment,group behavior,institutional choice

Institutional choice vs communication in social dilemmas – an experimental approach

This paper presents an experimental study that compares the ability of human groups to escape the tragedy of the commons through institutional change or communication. Teams of five players are placed in a dynamic CPR environment with inefficient institutional settings. The results clearly show the vital importance of communication. At the same time, the groups who were allowed to replace the inefficient institutional settings by other more appropriate rules performed worse than those groups who were not given this opportunity. --social dilemmas,laboratory experiment,group behavior,institutional choice,communication

Resilience of multi-robot systems to physical masquerade attacks

The advent of autonomous mobile multi-robot systems has driven innovation in both the industrial and defense sectors. The integration of such systems in safety-and security-critical applications has raised concern over their resilience to attack. In this work, we investigate the security problem of a stealthy adversary masquerading as a properly functioning agent. We show that conventional multi-agent pathfinding solutions are vulnerable to these physical masquerade attacks. Furthermore, we provide a constraint-based formulation of multi-agent pathfinding that yields multi-agent plans that are provably resilient to physical masquerade attacks. This formalization leverages inter-agent observations to facilitate introspective monitoring to guarantee resilience.Accepted manuscrip