Safe Pareto Improvements for Expected Utility Maximizers in Program Games

Understand

Agents in mixed-motive coordination problems such as Chicken may fail to coordinate on a Pareto-efficient outcome.

• Safe Pareto improvements (SPIs) were originally proposed to mitigate miscoordination in cases where players lack probabilistic beliefs as to how their delegates will play a game; delegates are instructed to behave so as to guarantee a Pareto improvement on how they would play by default.
• More generally, SPIs may be defined as transformations of strategy profiles such that all players are necessarily better off under the transformed profile.
• In this work, we investigate the extent to which SPIs can reduce downsides of miscoordination between expected utility-maximizing agents.