From Certain Doom to Survival: Agent-Driven Self-Governance in LLM Agent Societies

📅 2026-09-18
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
📄 PDF
🤖 AI Summary
研究通过让多智能体系统自主编写、调试和投票执行治理规则,解决资源稀缺下的生存问题,探讨了机构机制对生存的影响。
📝 Abstract
Multi-agent LLM systems are increasingly evaluated in social dilemmas, but most work treats governance as imposed by the experimenter, expressed rhetorically, or restricted to a fixed menu of mechanisms. We introduce GovSim-SelfGovern, an extension of the GovSim common-pool resource environment in which agents author executable Python governance rules, receive sandbox validation feedback, vote on proposed laws, and live under the rules they enact across rounds. To evaluate agent-driven self-governance, we examine three scenarios ranging from stable abundance to a fatal resource wall where five agents cannot all survive through harvest alone. To solve this, agents must write and debug useful laws in time before their institutions degrade sharply under resource pressure. Finally, we study a central alignment question: when agents hesitate to propose exile, are they rejecting it for normative reasons, or does it never enter their candidate set? Our results show that executable governance improves the space of possible interventions for agents, but survival depends on whether agents discover the right institutional mechanisms in time. Fiscal capacity enables redistribution, while deeper reasoning and removal of democratic veto make exile more feasible. GovSim-SelfGovern therefore adapts executable code actions to a common-pool governance setting and shows how scarcity turns institutional authorship into a political and ethical problem.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

self-governance
multi-agent systems
resource scarcity
institutional mechanisms
executable governance
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

executable governance
agent-driven self-governance
common-pool resource environment
💼 Related Jobs
No related jobs found.
G
Gregory B. Rehm
Meta