A key contributor to the success of modern societies is humanity’s innate ability to meaningfully cooperate. Modern game-theoretic reasoning shows however, that an individual’s amenity to cooperation is directly linked with the mechanics of the scenario at hand. Social dilemmas constitute a subset of particularly thorny such scenarios, typically modelled as normal-form or sequential games, where players are caught in a dichotomy between the decision to cooperate with teammates or to defect, and further their own goals. In this work, we study such social dilemmas through the lens of ’selfishness level’, a standard game-theoretic metric which quantifies the extent to which a game’s payoffs incentivize defective behaviours.The selfishness level is significant in this context as it doubles as a prescriptive notion, describing the exact payoff modifications necessary to induce players with prosocial preferences. Using this framework, we are able to derive conditions, and means, under which normal-form social dilemmas can be resolved. We also produce a first-step towards extending this metric to Markov-game or sequential social dilemmas with the aim of quantitatively measuring the magnitude to which such environments incentivize selfish behaviours. Finally, we present an exploratory empirical analysis showing the positive effects of using a selfishness level directed reward shaping scheme in such environments
