The subject of this paper is the cost of enforcement, to which we take a satisficing approach through the examination of marginal cost-benefit ratios. Social simulation is used to establish that less enforcement can be beneficial overall in economic terms, depending on the costs to system and/or stakeholders arising from enforcement. The results are demonstrated by means of a case study of wireless mobile grids (WMGs). In such systems the dominant strategy for economically rational users is to free-ride, i.e. to benefit from the system without contributing to it. We examine the use of enforcement agents that police the system and punish users that take but do not give. The agent-based simulation shows that a certain proportion of enforcement agents increases cooperation in WMG architectures. The novelty of the results lies in our empirical evidence for the diminishing marginal utility of enforcement agents: that is how much defection they can foreclose at what cost. We show that an increase in the number of enforcement agents does not always increase the overall benefits-cost ratio, but that with respect to satisficing, a minimum proportion of enforcement agents can be identified that yields the best results. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.
CITATION STYLE
Balke, T., De Vos, M., & Padget, J. (2013). Evaluating the cost of enforcement by agent-based simulation: A wireless mobile grid example. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 8291 LNAI, pp. 21–36). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-44927-7_3
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