Learning in public goods games: the effects of uncertainty and communication on cooperation

Communication is a widely used mechanism to promote cooperation in multi-agent systems. In the field of emergent communication, agents are typically trained in specific environments: cooperative, competitive or mixed-motive. Motivated by the idea that real-world settings are characterized by incomplete information and that humans face daily interactions under a wide spectrum of incentives, we aim to explore the role of emergent communication when simultaneously exploited across all these contexts. In this work, we pursue this line of research by focusing on social dilemmas. To do this, we developed an extended version of the Public Goods Game, which allows us to train independent reinforcement learning agents simultaneously in different scenarios where incentives are (mis)aligned to various extents. Additionally, agents experience uncertainty in terms of the alignment of their incentives with those of others. We equip agents with the ability to learn a communication policy and study the impact of emergent communication in the face of uncertainty among agents. Our findings show that in settings where all agents have the same level of uncertainty, communication can enhance the cooperation of the whole group. However, in cases of asymmetric uncertainty, the agents that do not face uncertainty learn to use communication to deceive and exploit their uncertain peers.