Emergent Collaboration in Social Purpose Games

Robert P. Gilles, Lina Mallozzi and Roberta Messalli

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We study a class of non-cooperative aggregative games -- denoted as \emph{social purpose games} -- in which the payoffs depend separately on a player's own strategy (individual benefits) and on a function of the strategy profile which is common to all players (social benefits) weighted by an individual benefit parameter. This structure allows for an asymmetric assessment of the social benefit across players. We show that these games have a potential and we investigate its properties. We investigate the payoff structure and the uniqueness of Nash equilibria and social optima. Furthermore, following the literature on partial cooperation, we investigate the leadership of a single coalition of cooperators while the rest of players act as non-cooperative followers. In particular, we show that social purpose games admit the emergence of a stable coalition of cooperators for the subclass of \emph{strict} social purpose games. Due to the nature of the partial cooperative leadership equilibrium, stable coalitions of cooperators reflect a limited form of farsightedness in their formation. As a particular application, we study the tragedy of the commons game. We show that there emerges a single stable coalition of cooperators to curb the over-exploitation of the resource.

Date: 2021-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-evo, nep-gth and nep-isf
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.08471 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2109.08471

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().