Cooperation with Complement is Better

TL;DR

This paper explores how heterogeneous agents can effectively cooperate by forming groups with complementary agents, demonstrating that preference for complementarity enhances success without extreme strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a model where agents form groups based on complementarity, showing that favoring complementary partners improves cooperation outcomes.

Findings

Preferring complementary agents leads to better cooperation success.

Extreme complementarity preferences are unnecessary due to saturation effects.

Group formation strategies significantly impact agent success.

Abstract

In a setting where heterogeneous agents interact to accomplish a given set of goals, cooperation is of utmost importance, especially when agents cannot achieve their individual goals by exclusive use of their own efforts. Even when we consider friendly environments and benevolent agents, cooperation involves several issues: with whom to cooperate, reciprocation, how to address credit assignment and complex division of gains, etc. We propose a model where heterogeneous agents cooperate by forming groups and formation of larger groups is promoted. Benefit of agents is proportional to the performance and the size of the group. There is a time pressure to form a group. We investigate how preferring similar or complement agents in group formation affects an agent's success. Preferring complement in group formation is found to be better, yet there is no need to push the strategy to the extreme since the effect of complementing partners is saturated.