research-article

Social Contracts for Non-Cooperative Games

Authors:

Michael RovatsosAuthors Info & Claims

AIES '20: Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society

Pages 43 - 49

https://doi.org/10.1145/3375627.3375829

Published: 07 February 2020 Publication History

Abstract

In future agent societies, we might see AI systems engaging in selfish, calculated behavior, furthering their owners' interests instead of socially desirable outcomes. How can we promote morally sound behaviour in such settings, in order to obtain more desirable outcomes? A solution from moral philosophy is the concept of a social contract, a set of rules that people would voluntarily commit to in order to obtain better outcomes than those brought by anarchy. We adapt this concept to a game-theoretic setting, to systematically modify the payoffs of a non-cooperative game, so that agents will rationally pursue socially desirable outcomes. We show that for any game, a suitable social contract can be designed to produce an optimal outcome in terms of social welfare. We then investigate the limitations of applying this approach to alternative moral objectives, and establish that, for any alternative moral objective that is significantly different from social welfare, there are games for which no such social contract will be feasible that produces non-negligible social benefit compared to collective selfish behaviour.

References

[1]

Colin Allen, Gary Varner, and Jason Zinser. 2000. Prolegomena to any future artificial moral agent. Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 12, 3 (2000), 251--261.

[2]

Robert J Aumann. 1987. Correlated equilibrium as an expression of Bayesian rationality. Econometrica: Journal of the Econometric Society (1987), 1--18.

[3]

Robert Axelrod. 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation .Basic Books, New York.

[4]

James M Buchanan. 1975. The limits of liberty: Between anarchy and Leviathan . Number 714. University of Chicago Press.

[5]

Ioannis Caragiannis, David Kurokawa, Hervé Moulin, Ariel D Procaccia, Nisarg Shah, and Junxing Wang. 2016. The unreasonable fairness of maximum Nash welfare. In International Conference on Economics and Computation. ACM, 305--322.

Digital Library

[6]

Suchan Chae and Jeong-Ae Yang. 1994. An N-person pure bargaining game. Journal of Economic Theory, Vol. 62, 1 (1994), 86--102.

[7]

George Christodoulou and Elias Koutsoupias. 2005. The price of anarchy of finite congestion games. In Proceedings of the thirty-seventh annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing. ACM, 67--73.

Digital Library

[8]

Richard Cole, Yevgeniy Dodis, and Tim Roughgarden. 2003. Pricing network edges for heterogeneous selfish users. In Proceedings of the thirty-fifth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing. ACM, 521--530.

Digital Library

[9]

Richard Cole, Yevgeniy Dodis, and Tim Roughgarden. 2006. How much can taxes help selfish routing? J. Comput. System Sci., Vol. 72, 3 (2006), 444--467.

Digital Library

[10]

Vincent Conitzer, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Jana Schaich Borg, Yuan Deng, and Max Kramer. 2017. Moral Decision Making Frameworks for Artificial Intelligence. In AAAI . 4831--4835.

[11]

Luciano Floridi and Jeff W Sanders. 2004. On the morality of artificial agents. Minds and machines, Vol. 14, 3 (2004), 349--379.

[12]

Dimitris Fotakis, George Karakostas, and Stavros G Kolliopoulos. 2010. On the existence of optimal taxes for network congestion games with heterogeneous users. In International Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory. Springer, 162--173.

[13]

James W Friedman. 1986. Game theory with applications to economics. Vol. 87. Oxford University Press New York.

[14]

Robert Gibbons. 2001. Trust in social structures: Hobbes and Coase meet repeated games. In Russell Sage foundation series on trust, Vol. 2. Trust in society, K. S. Cook (Ed.). Russel Sage Foundation, 332--353.

[15]

Joshua Greene, Francesca Rossi, John Tasioulas, Kristen Brent Venable, and Brian Charles Williams. 2016. Embedding Ethical Principles in Collective Decision Support Systems. In AAAI, Vol. 16. 4147--4151.

Digital Library

[16]

Douglas D Heckathorn and Steven M Maser. 1987. Bargaining and constitutional contracts. American Journal of Political Science (1987), 142--168.

[17]

Chris Holmes Parker, Adrian K Agogino, and Kagan Tumer. 2016. Combining reward shaping and hierarchies for scaling to large multiagent systems. The Knowledge Engineering Review, Vol. 31, 1 (2016), 3--18.

[18]

Matthew O Jackson. 2014. Mechanism theory. SSRN 2542983 (2014).

[19]

Elias Koutsoupias and Christos Papadimitriou. 1999. Worst-case equilibria. In Annual Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science. Springer, 404--413.

[20]

Derek Leben. 2017. A Rawlsian algorithm for autonomous vehicles. Ethics and Information Technology, Vol. 19, 2 (2017), 107--115.

Digital Library

[21]

Joshua Letchford, Vincent Conitzer, and Kamal Jain. 2008. An “ethical" game-theoretic solution concept for two-player perfect-information games. In International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics. Springer, 696--707.

Digital Library

[22]

David Mguni, Joel Jennings, Emilio Sison, Sergio Valcarcel Macua, Sofia Ceppi, and Enrique Munoz de Cote. 2019. Coordinating the Crowd: Inducing Desirable Equilibria in Non-Cooperative Systems. In International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems. 386--394.

[23]

John Stuart Mill. 2016. Utilitarianism. In Seven masterpieces of philosophy . Routledge, 337--383.

[24]

Dov Monderer and Moshe Tennenholtz. 2003. k-Implementation. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM conference on Electronic commerce. ACM, 19--28.

Digital Library

[25]

Ritesh Noothigattu, Snehalkumar'Neil'S Gaikwad, Edmond Awad, Sohan Dsouza, Iyad Rahwan, Pradeep Ravikumar, and Ariel D Procaccia. 2018. A voting-based system for ethical decision making. In AAAI .

[26]

Arthur C Pigou. 1920. The economics of welfare .Macmillan and co., London.

[27]

Iyad Rahwan. 2018. Society-in-the-loop: programming the algorithmic social contract. Ethics and Information Technology, Vol. 20, 1 (2018), 5--14.

Digital Library

[28]

John Rawls. 1971. A theory of justice .Harvard University Press.

[29]

AE Roth. 1988. The expected value of playing a game. In The Shapley Value: Essays in Honor of Lloyd S. Shapley. Vol. 51. 70.

[30]

Tim Roughgarden. 2007. Routing games. Algorithmic game theory, Vol. 18 (2007), 459--484.

[31]

William H Sandholm. 2007. Pigouvian pricing and stochastic evolutionary implementation. Journal of Economic Theory, Vol. 132, 1 (2007), 367--382.

[32]

Ramteen Sioshansi, Shmuel Oren, and Richard O'Neill. 2008. The cost of anarchy in self-commitment based electricity markets. Competitive Electricity Markets: Design, Implementation and Performance (2008), 245--266.

[33]

MJ Smith. 1979. The marginal cost taxation of a transportation network. Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Vol. 13, 3 (1979), 237--242.

[34]

Moshe Tennenholtz. 2004. Program equilibrium. Games and Economic Behavior, Vol. 49, 2 (2004), 363--373.

[35]

Kagan Tumer and Adrian Agogino. 2006. Agent reward shaping for alleviating traffic congestion. In Workshop on Agents in Traffic and Transportation. 87.

[36]

Andrew Tutt. 2016. An FDA for algorithms. Admin. Law Review, Vol. 69, 83 (2016).

[37]

John Von Neumann and 0 Morgenstern. 1944. Theory of games and economic behavior .Princeton UP.

Cited By

Blackledge BPapaoikonomou AScott MMertzani ALe Renard NMasoud HPitt J(2023)Incentivising Participation with Exclusionary Sanctions (Full)Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms, and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems XVI10.1007/978-3-031-49133-7_3(37-54)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-49133-7_3
Scott MDubied MPitt J(2022)Social Motives and Social Contracts in Cooperative Survival GamesCoordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms, and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems XV10.1007/978-3-031-20845-4_10(148-166)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20845-4_10

Index Terms

Social Contracts for Non-Cooperative Games
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Distributed artificial intelligence
      1. Cooperation and coordination
      2. Multi-agent systems
    2. Philosophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence

Recommendations

From ethics washing to ethics bashing: a view on tech ethics from within moral philosophy
FAT* '20: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

The word 'ethics' is under siege in technology policy circles. Weaponized in support of deregulation, self-regulation or handsoff governance, "ethics" is increasingly identified with technology companies' self-regulatory efforts and with shallow ...
The effect of collusion in congestion games
STOC '06: Proceedings of the thirty-eighth annual ACM symposium on Theory of Computing

In this paper we initiate the study of how collusion alters the quality of solutions obtained in competitive games. The price of anarchy aims to measure the cost of the lack of coordination by comparing the quality of a Nash equilibrium to that of a ...
Non-Cooperative Cost Sharing Games via Subsidies
Special Section: Algorithmic Game Theory; Guest Editors: Burkhard Monien and Ulf-Peter Schroeder

We consider a cost sharing system where users are selfish and act according to their own interest. There is a set of facilities and each facility provides services to a subset of the users. Each user is interested in purchasing a service, and will buy ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

AIES '20: Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society

February 2020

439 pages

ISBN:9781450371100

DOI:10.1145/3375627

General Chairs:
Annette Markham
Aarhus University | Loyola University
,
Julia Powles
University of Western Australia
,
Toby Walsh
TU Berlin | University of New South Wales | Data61
,
Anne L. Washington
New York University

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGAI: ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 February 2020

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Conference

AIES '20

Sponsor:

SIGAI

AIES '20: AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society

February 7 - 9, 2020

NY, New York, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 61 of 162 submissions, 38%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

2
Total Citations
View Citations
212
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)18
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 18 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Blackledge BPapaoikonomou AScott MMertzani ALe Renard NMasoud HPitt J(2023)Incentivising Participation with Exclusionary Sanctions (Full)Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms, and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems XVI10.1007/978-3-031-49133-7_3(37-54)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-49133-7_3
Scott MDubied MPitt J(2022)Social Motives and Social Contracts in Cooperative Survival GamesCoordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms, and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems XV10.1007/978-3-031-20845-4_10(148-166)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20845-4_10

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents