Altruistic decision making approach to resolve the tragedy of the commons

Abstract

The Tragedy of the Commons (TOC) is a social dilemma where rational and self-interested agents utilizing a shared resource of fixed capacity leads to inefficient utilization of the resource. In any society, two crucial aspects: individual and social concerns, are responsible for the ineffective performance of the system as well as the individual. Since these two aspects create a dilemmatic situation for an agent such as whether to contribute or exploit (enjoy own profit without caring about the society). Hence, the proper balancing between individual and social concerns is needed to avoid dilemma. In order to solve this problem, we propose a decentralized approach based on the altruistic behavior of agents, known as Altruistic Decision Making Approach (ADA). In ADA, agents communicate with each other and adjust their load in accordance with current context, i.e., the agents are able to dynamically vary their load to balance the individual and social considerations and also work in resource-bounded fashion. To judge the efficacy of the ADA, it is compared with another state-of-the-art decentralized approach over different social conditions and is found better than its competitor. Thus, it is observed that the ADA is simple, efficient and powerful decentralized approach for solving the TOC problem. © 2016 IEEE.