Human-agent coordination in a group formation game

TL;DR

This study investigates how human behavior adapts in a group formation game involving autonomous agents, revealing increased risk-taking and the impact of team composition on cluster formation.

Contribution

It demonstrates how human decision-making changes in mixed human-agent teams and explores the influence of team composition on cooperative behavior and performance.

Findings

Humans become less risk averse when playing with autonomous agents.

Team composition influences the evolution of clusters in the game.

Hybrid teams can maintain efficiency by balancing selfish and cooperative actions.

Abstract

Coordination and cooperation between humans and autonomous agents in cooperative games raises interesting questions of human decision making and behaviour changes. Here we report our findings from a group formation game in a small-world network of different mixes of human and agent players, aiming to achieve connected clusters of the same colour by swapping places with neighbouring players using non-overlapping information. In the experiments the human players are incentivized by rewarding to prioritize their own cluster while the model of agents' decision making is derived from our previous experiment of purely cooperative game between human players. The experiments were performed by grouping the players in three different setups to investigate the overall effect of having cooperative autonomous agents within teams. We observe that the change in the behavior of human subjects adjusts to playing with autonomous agents by being less risk averse, while keeping the overall performance efficient by splitting the behaviour into selfish and cooperative in the two actions performed during the rounds of the game. Moreover, results from two hybrid human-agent setups suggest that the group composition affects the evolution of clusters. Our findings indicate that in purely or lesser cooperative settings, providing more control to humans could help in maximizing the overall performance of hybrid systems.