Towards an Understanding of the Value of Cooperation in Uncertain World

Abstract

Abstract-Recent work has provided tantalizing hints that small amounts of cooperation may actually hurt a group's performance rather than help it. In this paper, we take a systematic look at the value of cooperation. Using a simple cooperative task where agents can act effectively individually but where high levels of cooperation will intuitively lead to better behavior, we investigated when and how cooperation helped overall performance. We systematically varied properties of the environment, e.g., the amount of uncertainty, and how much of what sort of cooperation the agents would perform, e.g., information sharing, resource allocation etc. Our experimental results show that, even if communication were free, and while typically coordination helps the team, under some circumstances, the team may be better off not coordinating at all than coordinating a little bit. We show that the level of uncertainty the agents face and their initial understandings of the environment determine whether a small amount of coordination is useful.

Social Cognition: Memory Decay and Adaptive Information Filtering for Robust Information Maintenance

“…The cognitive models employed as agents exemplify a hybrid multi-agent system: they are constrained by human memory and communication bandwidth. In recent work, a model, even one of the same Geo Game paradigm (Wang, Sycara, and Scerri 2011), which was not constrained by cognitive architecture, has demonstrated disadvantages of collaboration. This was the case as communication in fully connected networks was moderated according to several non-adaptive strategies.…”

Modeling behavioral experiments on uncertainty and cooperation with population-based reinforcement learning

“…For instance, in the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma it is also known as the shadow over the future [35], and it was shown to be an environmental component that enables cooperation to emerge. Moreover, other sources of uncertainty, such as uncertain returns have been studied previously, revealing that this uncertainty provides an increase in cooperation [36][37][38][39]. Additionally, [12,40] give a good overview of the effects of uncertainty on climate governance and social dilemmas.…”

Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems and Applications: A Survey

“…A common strategy to model uncertainty is to augment the outcome of the cost functions with a stochastic character (Atlas & Decker, 2010;Nguyen, Yeoh, & Lau, 2012). Another method is to introduce additional random variables as input to the cost functions, which simulate exogenous uncontrollable traits of the environment (Léauté & Faltings, 2009Wang, Sycara, & Scerri, 2011). To cope with such a variety, this section introduces the Probabilistic DCOP (P-DCOP) model, which generalizes the proposed models of uncertainty.…”