Resolving social dilemmas with minimal reward transfer

Understand

Social dilemmas present a significant challenge in multi-agent cooperation because individuals are incentivised to behave in ways that undermine socially optimal outcomes.

• Consequently, self-interested agents often avoid collective behaviour.
• In response, we formalise social dilemmas and introduce a novel metric, the general self-interest level, to quantify the disparity between individual and group rationality in such scenarios.
• This metric represents the maximum proportion of their individual rewards that agents can retain while ensuring that a social welfare optimum becomes a dominant strategy.