CoopEval: Benchmarking Cooperation-Sustaining Mechanisms and LLM Agents in Social Dilemmas
It is increasingly important that LLM agents interact effectively and safely with other goal-pursuing agents, yet, recent works report the opposite trend: LLMs with stronger reasoning capabilities behave _less_ cooperatively in mixed-motive games such as the prisoner's dilemma and public goods settings. Indeed, our experiments show that recent models -- with or without reasoning enabled -- consistently defect in single-shot social dilemmas. To tackle this safety concern, we present the first comparative study of game-theoretic mechanisms designed to enable cooperative outcomes between rational agents _in equilibrium_. Across four social dilemmas testing distinct components of robust coope...
| Authors | Emanuel Tewolde, Xiao Zhang, David Guzman Piedrahita et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.GT |
| Published | 16 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 July 2026 |
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