The Impact of Altruism in Symmetric Two-Strategy Population Games

IF 4.6 2区计算机科学 Q1 COMPUTER SCIENCE, CYBERNETICS

IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems Pub Date : 2026-10-01 Epub Date: 2026-08-03 DOI:10.1109/TCSS.2026.3713848

Colton Hill;Philip N. Brown;Keith Paarporn

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

It is well known that selfish behavior, where agents choose strategies to maximize their individual payoff, can lead to degraded social welfare. These inefficiencies can seemingly be mitigated when agents behave altruistically, and choose strategies intended to increase social welfare. However, in certain settings, altruism can be perverse, and worsen social welfare compared to if all agents had behaved selfishly. Thus, the goal of this article is to investigate altruistic perversity in the context of symmetric two-strategy population games containing a heterogeneous population of selfish and altruistic agents. We find that if a game has a strictly concave welfare function, then any agent is guaranteed to improve social welfare if they behave altruistically rather than selfishly. Then, we formalize the contrapositive, and show that altruism can be perverse only in population games with a convex social welfare function. Finally, we determine the worst-case harm caused by altruism when the welfare function is convex. Our results provide a complete characterization of how altruism impacts social welfare for the class of symmetric two-strategy games presented in normal form.

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对称双策略群体博弈中利他主义的影响

众所周知，在自私行为中，行为主体选择策略以最大化其个人收益，这可能导致社会福利的退化。当代理人表现出利他主义，并选择旨在增加社会福利的策略时，这些低效率似乎可以得到缓解。然而，在某些情况下，利他主义可能是反常的，与所有行为者都表现得自私相比，利他主义会恶化社会福利。因此，本文的目标是在包含自私和利他主体的异质群体的对称双策略群体博弈的背景下研究利他主义的反常行为。我们发现，如果一个博弈具有严格的凹福利函数，那么任何代理都可以保证提高社会福利，如果他们的行为是利他的，而不是自私的。然后，我们形式化了反命题，并证明了利他主义只有在具有凸社会福利函数的群体博弈中才可能是反常的。最后，我们确定了福利函数为凸时利他行为所造成的最坏危害。我们的结果提供了一个完整的特征，利他主义如何影响社会福利类对称双策略博弈在正常形式。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems Social Sciences-Social Sciences (miscellaneous)

CiteScore

10.00

自引率

20.00%

发文量

316

期刊介绍： IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems focuses on such topics as modeling, simulation, analysis and understanding of social systems from the quantitative and/or computational perspective. "Systems" include man-man, man-machine and machine-machine organizations and adversarial situations as well as social media structures and their dynamics. More specifically, the proposed transactions publishes articles on modeling the dynamics of social systems, methodologies for incorporating and representing socio-cultural and behavioral aspects in computational modeling, analysis of social system behavior and structure, and paradigms for social systems modeling and simulation. The journal also features articles on social network dynamics, social intelligence and cognition, social systems design and architectures, socio-cultural modeling and representation, and computational behavior modeling, and their applications.