The Conditions for Commitments

Previous work describes the use of formal commitments to mediate the communication between autonomous agents through commitment-based protocols. I extend that work to examine the conditions that encourage the success of agents that use commitments. I define a parameterized and iterated Committer’s Dilemma game that extends the well-known Prisoner’s Dilemma game, and then use this game and different agent strategies to examine how the conditions for commitments affect game outcomes. I describe the results of multiple simulations on a multiagent society with various game parameters. Results show that committing and satisfying agent types dominate over other agent types most frequently (1) when commitments are frequently exchanged, (2) when games tend to end at other than a Nash equilibria, (3) when the cost to create a commitment is low, and (4) when the utility of a given good is about 40% to 60% of the utility of a received good. A classifier, with over 95% accuracy, is trained to predict which Committer’s Dilemma game parameters lead to commitment-based agent strategies dominating the agent society.