Solving social dilemmas by reasoning about expectations

Abstract: It has been argued that one role of social constructs, such as institutions, trust and norms, is to coordinate the expectations of autonomous entities in order to resolve collective action situations (such as collective risk dilemmas) through the coordination of behaviour. While much work has addressed the formal representation of these social constructs, in this paper we focus specifically on the formal representation of, and associated reasoning with, the expectations themselves. In particular, we investigate how explicit reasoning about expectations can be used to encode both traditional game theory solution concepts and social mechanisms for the social dilemma situation. We use the Collective Action Simulation Platform (CASP) to model a collective risk dilemma based on a flood plain scenario and show how using expectations in the reasoning mechanisms of the agents making decisions supports the choice of cooperative behaviour.