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.

Publication Details

Journal
Research Portal (King's College London)
Published
2025-06-05
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5555/3709347.3744012
Primary Topic
Topic Modeling
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

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

Research Portal (King's College London)
Topic Modeling
article

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

article en

Abstract

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.

Research Portal (King's College London)
Openalex Percentile: Top 21%
Topic Modeling
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Will Systems of LLM Agents Lead to Cooperation:An Investigation into a Social Dilemma · Research Portal (King's College London) (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS