Awareness in collective decision-making: Modeling and control in a game-theoretic framework

2026-05-04

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of steering individual behavior toward collective welfare—such as sustainable practices or support for vulnerable groups—when personal interests conflict with societal well-being. It innovatively integrates a mechanism of “awareness” into a game-theoretic and networked systems framework, developing a collective decision-making model that unifies group dynamics with control theory. By designing intervention strategies grounded in system-theoretic control principles, the work effectively guides the evolution of group behavior toward socially desirable outcomes. The research elucidates the pivotal role of awareness in fostering cooperation and collective action and proposes a computationally tractable and practically implementable framework for regulating group dynamics.

Abstract

For a society to remain healthy and prosperous, people must collectively behave and act to contribute to the common good, even if there is often a tradeoff against their individual benefit. Paradigmatic examples include the adoption of sustainable behaviors and technologies to combat the climate crisis, and the mobilization for collective action to promote the rights and freedoms of repressed minorities. In this tutorial, we illustrate how game theory and network systems theory can be powerful tools to model and study this collective decision-making problem. We provide examples of how awareness of this tradeoff can impact collective change toward the societal good, exploring different problem contexts such as sustainable behavior and collective action. Finally, we review recent developments using systems and control-theoretic approaches to generate awareness and guide the emergent population dynamics towards a desired outcome, and conclude by highlighting new research and application frontiers.

Problem

• collective decision-making
• awareness
• game theory
• sustainable behavior
• collective action

Innovation

• collective decision-making
• game theory
• network systems
• awareness
• control-theoretic approaches