Interactions across multiple games: cooperation, corruption, and organizational design

2025-07-02

AI Summary

This paper examines the evolution of cross-context cooperation when “good games” (cooperative settings that enhance social welfare) and “bad games” (non-cooperative settings that incentivize corruption) alternate stochastically. It identifies a cross-game spillover effect in cooperative expectations: sustaining cooperation in good games may endogenously require cooperation in bad games, thereby exacerbating corruption risk. Method: Building on dynamic game theory and mechanism design, the authors develop a team–task matching model in a multi-task environment, formalizing trade-offs among worker assignment, task-type arrival rates (good vs. bad games), and cooperation stability. Contribution/Results: Theoretical analysis establishes that optimal organizational design—via differentiated team composition and adaptive task scheduling—can suppress cooperative incentives in bad games without undermining cooperation in good games. This significantly reduces corruption probability while enhancing long-term social welfare.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Cooperative Game Theory
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Humans and AI: Teamwork, Team formation

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution

Abstract

It is socially beneficial for teams to cooperate in some situations (``good games'') and not in others (``bad games;'' e.g., those that allow for corruption). A team's cooperation in any given game depends on expectations of cooperation in future iterations of both good and bad games. We identify when sustaining cooperation on good games necessitates cooperation on bad games. We then characterize how a designer should optimally assign workers to teams and teams to tasks that involve varying arrival rates of good and bad games. Our results show how organizational design can be used to promote cooperation while minimizing corruption.

Problem

• Balancing cooperation in good and bad games
• Optimizing team assignment to minimize corruption
• Designing organizations to sustain beneficial cooperation

Innovation

• Sustaining cooperation across good and bad games
• Optimal worker-team-task assignment strategy
• Organizational design minimizes corruption effectively