How Much Does Users' Psychology Matter in Engineering Mean-Field-Type Games

TL;DR

This paper explores how incorporating users' psychological factors, such as empathy, into mean-field-type game models affects strategic interactions, fairness, and cooperation in engineering systems and experiments.

Contribution

It introduces psychological payoffs into mean-field games, demonstrating their impact on equilibrium, fairness, and cooperation, supported by theoretical analysis and a user experiment.

Findings

Empathy enhances fairness and cooperation in mean-field games.

Classical game strategies are altered when psychological factors are considered.

Experimental results show increased cooperation among empathetic participants.

Abstract

Until now mean-field-type game theory was not focused on cognitively-plausible models of choices in humans, animals, machines, robots, software-defined and mobile devices strategic interactions. This work presents some effects of users' psychology in mean-field-type games. In addition to the traditional "material" payoff modelling, psychological patterns are introduced in order to better capture and understand behaviors that are observed in engineering practice or in experimental settings. The psychological payoff value depends upon choices, mean-field states, mean-field actions, empathy and beliefs. It is shown that the affective empathy enforces mean-field equilibrium payoff equity and improves fairness between the players. It establishes equilibrium systems for such interactive decision-making problems. Basic empathy concepts are illustrated in several important problems in engineering including resource sharing, packet collision minimization, energy markets, and forwarding in Device-to-Device communications. The work conducts also an experiment with 47 people who have to decide whether to cooperate or not. The basic Interpersonal Reactivity Index of empathy metrics were used to measure the empathy distribution of each participant. Android app called Empathizer is developed to analyze systematically the data obtained from the participants. The experimental results reveal that the dominated strategies of the classical game theory are not dominated any more when users' psychology is involved, and a significant level of cooperation is observed among the users who are positively partially empathetic.