The Role of Power and Jealousy in Cooperation — A Framework for Artificial Agents

Abstract

We are interested in the question of how to motivate people to share valuable information so that group performance can be leveraged. In particular, we investigate the impact of power and jealousy on cooperation. It is an unresolved issue how these two social phenomena influence cooperation. We study the impact of power and jealousy to cooperation models by using dynamic artificial agents and agent populations following combined characteristics. We simulate dynamic multi player goods games and we use the Business Transaction Theory as a basic layer for information valuation. Payoff matrices as they are used in evolutionary game theory are also applied. Our motivation to use artificial agents is manifold. First, we are able to simulate small to huge populations in short time, second we are flexible in changing agent characteristics, and third it is hard to find people who admit being jealous in real life. The technical framework is based on the eclipse development environment. The artificial agents are programmed in Java. Our interdisciplinary approach is new since emotions, in context with collaboration, have never been investigated by artificial agents and game theoretical means. Our findings show that incentives might have a big influence on jealousy and even on egoists.

Jealousy in Cooperation — A Comparison of Two Game-Based Approaches

“…In a previous article, we used stochastic updating procedures. One result of the previous investigations (Barachini, 2015) is shown in Table-1. Analyzing Table-1, we observe, that there is a convergence, even in very large populations.…”

“…In the previous stochastic analysis ( Barachini, 2015), we used specific games which are not identical to the deterministic spatial game based approach. In the deterministic approach, we used a simple matrix representing prisoner dilemmas.…”

“…As explained in Barachini (Barachini, 2015) in the stochastic approach, we used many modules of our own Java based architecture. Figure-10 shows the basic modules.…”

“…We investigate the impact of jealousy on cooperation. In a previous study (Barachini, 2015) we used stochastic updating procedures and the business transaction theory (Barachini, 2007(Barachini, , 2009 for our investigations. In this study, we investigate the deterministic evolutionary dynamics of populations, which are arranged in a lattice.…”

“…Emotions play a big role during cooperation. Jealousy seems to play a special role (Barachini, 2015;Brockner, 1988;Pelham et al, 1989;Rydell et al, 2007). We investigate a game theoretical approach, how jealous agents can invade co-operators and vice versa.…”