Situational Altruism: Making Conditional Commitments

Approaches to decision making that are based on individual rationality, whether relying upon classical game-theoretic notions or upon modern distributed artificial intelligence based concepts, are limited in their ability to characterize cooperative social behavior. Altruism, in particular, is a difficult concept to characterize with these approaches. In this paper we contrast categorical altruism (unconditionally modifying one’s utilities to accommodate the interests of another) and situational altruism (conditional modification of one’s utilities to accommodate the interests of another), where the conditioning is under the control of the one offering the accommodation.