Can cooperation among large language model (LLM) agents be evolutionarily stable against free-rider invasion? We study an indirect reciprocity donation game where LLM agents observe behavioral traces and donate on a continuous scale. Strategies, represented as natural language prompts, evolve through cultural transmission across generations. Across four LLM backends, robustness to free-rider invasion varies by more than an order of magnitude. The strongest predictor of this robustness is opponent endowment sensitivity, the degree to which agents discriminate between cooperative and uncooperative opponents, operationalizing the classical Image Scoring mechanism. By contrast, adherence to the Leading-Eight L1 norm does not predict robustness. Robustness depends on defector exclusion: while both cooperator reward and defector punishment vary across models, only the stringency of defector exclusion predicts resistance to free-rider invasion. These findings reveal that LLM agents are confined to Image Scoring-like discrimination and fail to develop the more robust Leading-Eight norms, highlighting a fundamental vulnerability in culturally evolved LLM cooperation and motivating bottom-up approaches to norm construction.
The results reveal that reputation-modulated learning significantly promotes the emergence of cooperative behavior, and the discontinuous phase transition from full cooperation to full defection as the temptation increases.
Chenyang Zhao, Ji-Qiang Zhang, Li Chen et al.· 0 citations
Reinforcement learning provides a framework for studying how individuals adjust their behavior through repeated interaction and feedback in social dilemmas. In Q-learning, exploration controls how often agents choose actions other than those favored by their current learned Q-values. Yet, the existing models usually tr...
Ang Li, Wenqiang Zhu, Chao-Qian Wang et al.· Chaos· 0 citations
This paper introduces the first framework for evaluating LLM decision making when agents are provided with graded similarity signals, and develops an LLM-behavioral-game-theoretic model that captures some of their reasoning rationale, and can support cooperative outcomes in equilibrium under sufficiently high similarit...
People often cooperate out of concern for their reputation. The corresponding theory of indirect reciprocity predicts that such cooperation can only evolve if people's opinions of each other are sufficiently correlated. This correlation, however, can be difficult to achieve when individuals form their opinions independ...
Yukari Jessica Tham, C. Hilbe, Yohsuke Murase· Proceedings of the National...· 0 citations
Mechanistic analyses show that a moderate neighborhood size enables individuals to strike an optimal balance between information sufficiency and decision-making tractability, which allows them to detect reciprocal opportunities while avoiding the deterioration of decision quality due to information overload.
Yi-Hsin Ku, Xin Ou, Ji-Qiang Zhang et al.· 0 citations
The evolution of cooperation depends critically on the possibility of voluntary non-participation as a strategy, allowing agents to survive while opting out of the public goods game altogether, as well as the presence of strong second-order punishment, where all first-order punishers are also second-order punishers.
Sarah Erskine, M. Dyble· Royal Society Open Science· 0 citations
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