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Commitment and extortion

Published: 14 May 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Making commitments, e.g., through promises and threats, enables a player to exploit the strengths of his own strategic position as well as the weaknesses of that of his opponents. Which commitments a player can make with credibility depends on the circumstances. In some, a player can only commit to the performance of an action, in others, he can commit himself conditionally on the actions of the other players. Some situations even allow for commitments on commitments or for commitments to randomized actions. We explore the formal properties of these types of (conditional) commitment and their interrelationships. So as to preclude inconsistencies among conditional commitments, we assume an order in which the players make their commitments. Central to our analyses is the notion of an extortion, which we define, for a given order of the players, as a profile that contains, for each player, an optimal commitment given the commitments of the players that committed earlier. On this basis, we investigate for different commitment types whether it is advantageous to commit earlier rather than later, and how the outcomes obtained through extortions relate to backward induction and Pareto efficiency.

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Cited By

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  • (2021)Evolution of coordination in pairwise and multi-player interactions via prior commitmentsAdaptive Behavior10.1177/105971232199316630:3(257-277)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2021
  • (2017)Evolution of commitment and level of participation in public goods gamesAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-016-9338-431:3(561-583)Online publication date: 1-May-2017
  • (2016)Emergence of social punishment and cooperation through prior commitmentsProceedings of the Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.5555/3016100.3016248(2494-2500)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2016
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
AAMAS '07: Proceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
May 2007
1585 pages
ISBN:9788190426275
DOI:10.1145/1329125
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 14 May 2007

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Author Tags

  1. commitment
  2. extortion
  3. game theory
  4. multiagent systems

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,155 of 5,036 submissions, 23%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2021)Evolution of coordination in pairwise and multi-player interactions via prior commitmentsAdaptive Behavior10.1177/105971232199316630:3(257-277)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2021
  • (2017)Evolution of commitment and level of participation in public goods gamesAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-016-9338-431:3(561-583)Online publication date: 1-May-2017
  • (2016)Emergence of social punishment and cooperation through prior commitmentsProceedings of the Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.5555/3016100.3016248(2494-2500)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2016
  • (2013)Emergence of Cooperation Using Commitments and Complex Network DynamicsProceedings of the 2013 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conferences on Web Intelligence (WI) and Intelligent Agent Technologies (IAT) - Volume 0210.1109/WI-IAT.2013.130(345-352)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2013
  • (2013)Complex Systems of Mindful Entities: On Intention Recognition and CommitmentModel-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology10.1007/978-3-642-37428-9_28(499-525)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2013
  • (2012)The emergence of commitments and cooperationProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 110.5555/2343576.2343656(559-566)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2012
  • (2009)Learning and Approximating the Optimal Strategy to Commit ToProceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory10.1007/978-3-642-04645-2_23(250-262)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2009

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