Relationship design for socially-aware behavior in static games

Abstract

Autonomous agents can adopt socially-aware behaviors to reduce social costs, mimicking the way animals interact in nature and humans in society. We present a new approach to model socially-aware decision-making that includes two key elements: bounded rationality and inter-agent relationships. We capture the inter-agent relationships by introducing a novel model called a relationship game and encode agents’ bounded rationality using quantal response equilibria. For each relationship game, we define a social cost function and formulate a mechanism design problem to optimize weights for relationships that minimize social cost at the equilibrium. We address the multiplicity of equilibria by presenting the problem in two forms: Min-Max and Min-Min, aimed respectively at minimization of the highest and lowest social costs in the equilibria. We compute the quantal response equilibrium by solving a least-squares problem defined with its Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions, and propose two projected gradient descent algorithms to solve the mechanism design problems. Numerical results, including two-lane congestion and congestion with an ambulance, confirm that these algorithms consistently reach the equilibrium with the intended social costs.