Social Cooperation in Autonomous Agents to Avoid the Tragedy of the Commons

Abstract

In this paper, we address the “Tragedy of the Commons” (TOC) problem for shared-resource systems by considering different types of behaviors of agents. On one extreme are self-interested agents while on the other one, agents are concerned about the welfare of the society. Algorithms to capture the different behaviors of the agents with and without interaction among the agents are proposed. An extensive experimental analysis for the different cases has been carried out as well as comparisons of our algorithms with an existing approach. Our study shows that if the agents are willing to sacrifice for some period of time, the sustainability of the society increases considerably.