Incentives to Build Houses, Trade Houses, or Trade House Building Skills in Simulated Worlds under Various Governing Systems or Institutions: Comparing Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning to Generative Agent-based Model

TL;DR

This study compares multi-agent reinforcement learning and generative agent-based models in simulating how different social institutions influence economic behaviors like building and trading houses in artificial worlds.

Contribution

It introduces extended models allowing agents to build and trade houses and skills, and analyzes how various governing systems affect these behaviors in simulated environments.

Findings

Semi-Libertarian/Utilitarian and Inclusive systems promote more building activities.

Full-Utilitarian systems increase building when societal equality is prioritized.

Full-Libertarian systems enhance building activities when productivity is prioritized.

Abstract

It has been shown that social institutions impact human motivations to produce different behaviours, such as amount of working or specialisation in labor. With advancement in artificial intelligence (AI), specifically large language models (LLMs), now it is possible to perform in-silico simulations to test various hypotheses around this topic. Here, I simulate two somewhat similar worlds using multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework of the AI-Economist and generative agent-based model (GABM) framework of the Concordia. In the extended versions of the AI-Economist and Concordia, the agents are able to build houses, trade houses, and trade house building skill. Moreover, along the individualistic-collectivists axis, there are a set of three governing systems: Full-Libertarian, Semi-Libertarian/Utilitarian, and Full-Utilitarian. Additionally, in the extended AI-Economist, the Semi-Libertarian/Utilitarian system is further divided to a set of three governing institutions along the discriminative axis: Inclusive, Arbitrary, and Extractive. Building on these, I am able to show that among governing systems and institutions of the extended AI-Economist, under the Semi-Libertarian/Utilitarian and Inclusive government, the ratios of building houses to trading houses and trading house building skill are higher than the rest. Furthermore, I am able to show that in the extended Concordia when the central government care about equality in the society, the Full-Utilitarian system generates agents building more houses and trading more house building skill. In contrast, these economic activities are higher under the Full-Libertarian system when the central government cares about productivity in the society. Overall, the focus of this paper is to compare and contrast two advanced techniques of AI, MARL and GABM, to simulate a similar social phenomena with limitations.