Improving resource exploitation via Collective Intelligence by assessing agents’ impact on the community outcome

A Collective Intelligence (COIN) can improve the exploitation of a limited renewable resource compared to fully cooperative or fully competitive approaches. The main strength of a COIN lies in approximating the impact of an agent on the short-term behaviour of a Complex Adaptive System. By penalising behaviours which lead to no measurable impact, COIN simplifies the implementation of an appropriate cost function which each agent needs to optimize in order to reach a global, community-wide goal. On a number of virtual experiments mimicking a fishing fleet operating in areas of different fishing capacity, a COIN provides optimal catches for the fleet while at the same time each individual vessel also maximizes its own profit: no individual sacrifice is required to achieve the common goal. In the view of possible application by real human agents, I propose a simplified implementation of a COIN, which involves only elementary numerical operations and minimum bookkeeping and can thereby be carried out simply by ‘pen and paper’, with no help of electronic devices.