Stability of cooperation in societies of emotional and moody agents

It is well documented that cooperation may not be achieved in societies where self-interested agents are engaging in Prisoner’s Dil

On the role of mobility and interaction topologies in social dilemmas

Numerous studies have developed and analysed strategies for maximising utility in social dilemmas from both an individual agent's perspective and more generally from the viewpoint of a society. In this paper we bring this body of work together by investigating the success of a wide range of strategies in environments with varying characteristics, comparing their success. In particular we study within agent-based simulations, different interaction topologies, agents with and without mobility, and strategies with and without adaptation in the form of reinforcement learning, in both competitive and cooperative settings represented by the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Stag Hunt, respectively. The results of our experiments show that allowing agents mobility decreases the level of cooperation in the society of agents, due to singular interactions with individual opponents that limit the possibility for direct reciprocity. Unstructured environments similarly support a greater number of singular interactions and thus higher levels of defection in the Prisoner's Dilemma. In the Stag Hunt, strategies that prioritise risk taking show a greater level of success regardless of environment topology. Our range of experiments yield new insights into the role that mobility and interaction topologies play in the study of cooperation in agent societies

Stability of Human-Inspired Agent Societies

Models of emotion, particularly those based on the Ortony, Clore, and Collins (OCC) account of emotions, have been used as part of agents' decision making processes to explore their effects on cooperation within social dilemmas [7, 19, 22]. We analyse two different interpretations of OCC agents. Firstly, Emotional agents that decide their action using only a model of emotions. To analyse the possibility of evolutionary stability of these agents we use the Prisoner's Dilemma game. We contrast the results with the second interpretation of an OCC agent, the Moody agent [7], which additionally uses a psychology-grounded model of mood. Our analysis highlights the different strategies that are needed to achieve success as a society in terms of both stability and cooperation, in the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. The Emotional agents are better suited playing against a mixed group of agents with differing strategies than the Moody agents are. The Moody agents are more successful than the Emotional agents when only one strategy exists in the society