Individually incentivized safe Pareto improvements in open-source bargaining
Summary Agents might fail to peacefully trade in high-stakes negotiations. Such bargaining failures can have catastrophic consequences, including great power conflicts, and AI flash wars. This post is a distillation of DiGiovanni et al. (2024) (DCM), whose central result is that agents that are sufficiently transparent to each other have individual incentives to avoid catastrophic bargaining failures. More precisely, DCM constructs strategies that are plausibly individually incentivized, and, if adopted by all, guarantee each player no less than their least preferred trade outcome. Figure 0 below illustrates this. This result is significant because artificial general intelligences (AGIs) might (i) be involved in high-stakes negotiations, (ii) be designed with the capabilities required for the type of strategy we’ll present, and (iii) bargain poorly by default (since bargaining competence isn’t […]
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