Coordinating human and agent behavior in collective-risk scenarios

Abstract

Various social situations entail a collective risk. A well-known example is climate change, wherein the risk of a future environmental disaster clashes with the immediate economic interest of developed and developing countries. The collective-risk game operationalizes this kind of situations. The decision process of the participants is determined by how good they are in evaluating the probability of future risk as well as their ability to anticipate the actions of the opponents. Anticipatory behavior contrasts with the reactive theories often used to analyze social dilemmas. Our initial work can already show that anticipative agents are a better model to human behavior than reactive ones. All the agents we studied used a recurrent neural network, however, only the ones that used it to predict future outcomes (anticipative agents) were able to account for changes in the context of games, a behavior also observed in experiments with humans. This extended abstract aims to explain how we wish to investigate anticipation within the context of the collective-risk game and the relevance these results may have for the field of hybrid socio-technical systems.