Mechanism Design Is Not Enough: Prosocial Agents for Cooperative AI
Ensuring that AI agents behave safely and beneficially when interacting with other parties has emerged as one of the central challenges of modern AI safety. While mechanism design, as the theory of designing rules to align individual and collective objectives, can incentivize cooperative behavior, it is still an open question whether it alone is sufficient to maximize LLM agents' social welfare. This work proves that the answer is negative: drawing from incomplete contract theory, we formally show that when contracts cannot distinguish all relevant future contingencies, there is a strictly positive welfare loss that no realistic mechanism can eliminate. We show that prosocial agents, who ...
| Authors | Xuanqiang Angelo Huang, Charlie Tharas, Samuele Marro et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.GT |
| Published | 8 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 September 2026 |
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