Multi-agent cooperation is an important topic, and is particularly challenging in mixed-motive situations where it does not pay to be nice to others. Consequently, self-interested agents often avoid collective behaviour, resulting in suboptimal outcomes for the group. In response, in this paper we introduce a metric to quantify the disparity between what is rational for individual agents and what is rational for the group, which we call the general self-interest level. This metric represents the maximum proportion of individual rewards that all agents can retain while ensuring that achieving social welfare optimum becomes a dominant strategy. By aligning the individual and group incentives, rational agents acting to maximise their own reward will simultaneously maximise the collective reward. As agents transfer their rewards to motivate others to consider their welfare, we diverge from traditional concepts of altruism or prosocial behaviours. The general self-interest level is a property of a game that is useful for assessing the propensity of players to cooperate and understanding how features of a game impact this. We illustrate the effectiveness of our method on several novel games representations of social dilemmas with arbitrary numbers of players.

翻译：多智能体合作是一个重要课题，在混合动机情境中尤为具有挑战性——此时善待他人并无益处。因此，自私的智能体常常回避集体行为，导致群体结果次优。为此，本文提出一个量化个体理性与群体理性差距的度量指标，称为一般自利水平。该指标表示所有智能体在确保实现社会福利最优成为占优策略的条件下，可保留的个体奖励最大比例。通过协调个体与群体激励，理性智能体在最大化自身奖励的同时，将同步最大化集体奖励。由于智能体通过转移奖励来促使他人考虑自身福祉，我们突破了传统的利他主义或亲社会行为概念。一般自利水平是博弈的一种属性，可用于评估参与者合作倾向并理解博弈特征对合作的影响。我们在多个包含任意数量参与者的新型社会困境博弈表征中验证了该方法的有效性。