Experiments with Social Capital in Multi-agent Systems

Social scientist define social capital as a feature or attribute of an organisation or an individual that facilitates cooperation to achieve mutual benefit and enhances their ability to solve collective action problems. In this paper we present a set of experiments on an electronic version of social capital in two different scenarios of repeated pairwise interactions amongst agents. The results show that (i) social capital can be represented in a computational form, and (ii) that the use of social capital does indeed support effective collective action. These results offer a convincing demonstration that being able to represent and reason about (electronic) social capital provides a compelling alternative solution to cooperation dilemmas in multi-agent systems.

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