The Energy Society: A Simulation Environment for Studying Agent Cooperation under Survival Pressure
LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent environments whose incentives can shape their behavior. We introduce The Energy Society, a minimal survival economy for studying how competitive and cooperative incentives affect emergent behavior when inference cost is directly tied to survival: Agents spend energy based on model size when generating tokens, regain energy by completing jobs or receiving donations, and deactivate if their energy reaches zero. We compare competitive and cooperative objectives against a baseline setting and several control variants. Across experiments, larger models consistently consume the most energy and spend more energy than they gain, even in th...
| Authors | Lucas Bergholdt Hansen, Federico Torrielli, Filippo Tonini et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.MA |
| Published | 16 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 July 2026 |
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