Abstract
Social punishment has been suggested as a key approach to ensuring high levels of cooperation and norm compliance in one-shot interactions. However, it has been shown that it only works when punishment is highly cost-efficient. On the other hand, signalling retribution hearkens back to medieval sovereignty, insofar as the very word for gallows in French stems from the Latin word for power and serves as a grim symbol of the ruthlessness of high justice. Here we introduce the mechanism of signalling an act of punishment and a special type of defector emerges, one who can recognise this signal and avoid punishment by way of fear. We perform extensive agent-based simulations so as to confirm and expand our understanding of the external factors that influence the success of social punishment. We show that our suggested mechanism serves as a catalyst for cooperation, even when signalling and punishment are very costly. We observe the preventive nature of advertising retributive acts and we contend that the resulting social prosperity is a desirable outcome in the contexts of AI and multi-agent systems. Overall, we suggest that fear acts as an effective stimulus to pro-social behaviour.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2020 |
Editors | Bo An, Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, Gita Sukthankar |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
Pages | 1819-1821 |
Number of pages | 3 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450375184 |
Publication status | Published - 9 May 2020 |
Event | 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2020 - Virtual, Auckland, New Zealand Duration: 19 May 2020 → … |
Publication series
Name | AAMAS Proceedings |
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ISSN (Electronic) | 2523-5699 |
Conference
Conference | 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2020 |
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Country | New Zealand |
City | Virtual, Auckland |
Period | 19/05/20 → … |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the Future of Life Institute (grant RFP2-154).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS). All rights reserved.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.