Local Wealth Redistribution Promotes Cooperation in Multiagent Systems

Designing mechanisms that leverage cooperation between agents has been a long-lasting goal in Multiagent Systems. The task is especially challenging when agents are selfish, lack common goals and face social dilemmas, i.e., situations in which individual inter- est conflicts with social welfare. Past works explored mechanisms that explain cooperation in biological and social systems, provid- ing important clues for the aim of designing cooperative artificial societies. In particular, several works show that cooperation is able to emerge when specific network structures underlie agents’ in- teractions. Notwithstanding, social dilemmas in which defection is highly tempting still pose challenges concerning the effective sustainability of cooperation. Here we propose a new redistribu- tion mechanism that can be applied in structured populations of agents. Importantly, we show that, when implemented locally (i.e., agents share a fraction of their wealth surplus with their nearest neighbors), redistribution excels in promoting cooperation under regimes where, before, only defection prevailed.

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Recommended citation: Pinheiro, Flávio L., and Fernando P. Santos. "Local Wealth Redistribution Promotes Cooperation in Multiagent Systems." In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, pp. 786-794. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2018.