Resisting Exploitation Through Rewiring in Social Networks: Social Welfare Increase using Parity, Sympathy and Reciprocity

We seek to understand how socially desirable traits like sympathy, reciprocity and fairness can survive in environments that include aggressive and exploitative agents. Social scientists have long observed and theorized about ingrained motivational factors as explanations for departures from self-seeking behaviors by human subjects. Some of these factors, namely reciprocity, have also been studied extensively in the context of agent systems as tools for promoting cooperation and improving social welfare in stable societies. In this paper, we investigate how other factors like sympathy and parity can be used by agents to leverage cooperation possibilities while avoiding exploitation traps in more dynamic societies. We evaluate the relative effectiveness of agents using different social considerations when they can change who they interact with in their environment. Such rewiring of social networks not only allows possibly vulnerable agents to avoid exploitation but also allows them to form gainful coalitions to leverage mutually beneficial cooperation, thereby significantly improving social welfare.