Will Systems of LLM Agents Lead to Cooperation: An Investigation into a Social Dilemma

This study investigates the emergent cooperative tendencies of systems of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in a social dilemma. Unlike previous research, where LLMs output individual actions, we prompt state-of-the-art LLMs to generate complete strategies for iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit biases when prompted to display certain behavioural dispositions, and the format of the prompt affects the relative success of aggressive versus cooperative strategies.