Determining Cooperation in Multiagent Systems with Cultural Traits

Achieving cooperation among autonomous and rational agents is still a major challenge. In the past, altruistic cooperation was generally explained through genetic kinship relations. However, the theory of ‘cultural kin’ is an approach that tries to explain altruism through cultural relatedness. To promote cooperation among autonomous and rational agents, this work transfers the idea of cultural characteristics, which benefits social behaviour, to multiagent systems (MAS). Accordingly, agents are characterised by cultural traits, which they can imitate from their neighbours and are supposed to solve tasks, for which they need the cooperation of other agents in most cases. The interaction of cooperation and cultural trait propagation will be investigated in a theoretical analysis and in an empirical simulation in a particular developed framework. As a novelty, schemata will be analysed that are beyond the well-studied one-to-one interaction.