Commitment To Cooperation With Self-Negotiated Contracts
As AI agents operate with increasing autonomy in a multi-agent world, they will need to learn to cooperate with other agents and with humans to generate mutual benefits. However, cooperation is a challenge because the costs of cooperation are often incurred early on, but the benefits are only realized later, creating an incentive to defect. How can AI agents cooperate with commitment? Here, we draw on inspiration from legal institutions and contracting that human societies have used to solve principal-agent problems of this kind. Contracts provide observable representations of agreements that enable credible commitments through the enforcement of terms. We study the role of contract-based...
| Authors | Tim Wyse, Kaitlin Bustos, Yulia Volkova et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 23 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 July 2026 |
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