Kanefumi Matsuyama, Kefan Su, Jiangxing Wang
et al.
Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) aims to develop agents that can collaborate effectively. However, most cooperative MARL methods overfit training agents, making learned policies not generalize well to unseen collaborators, which is a critical issue for real-world deployment. Some methods attempt to address the generalization problem but require prior knowledge or predefined policies of new teammates, limiting real-world applications. To this end, we propose a hierarchical MARL approach to enable generalizable cooperation via role diversity, namely CORD. CORD's high-level controller assigns roles to low-level agents by maximizing the role entropy with constraints. We show this constrained objective can be decomposed into causal influence in role that enables reasonable role assignment, and role heterogeneity that yields coherent, non-redundant role clusters. Evaluated on a variety of cooperative multi-agent tasks, CORD achieves better performance than baselines, especially in generalization tests. Ablation studies further demonstrate the efficacy of the constrained objective in generalizable cooperation.
This paper studies a two-player game in which the players face uncertainty regarding the nature of their partner. In this variation of the standard Prisoner's Dilemma, players may encounter an 'honest' type who always cooperates. Mistreating such a player imposes a moral cost on the defector. This situation creates a trade-off, resolved in favor of cooperation if the player's trust level, or belief in their partner's honesty, is sufficiently high. We investigate whether an environment where players have explicit beliefs about each other's honesty is more or less conducive to cooperation, compared to a scenario where players are entirely uncertain about their partner's beliefs. We establish that belief diversity hampers cooperation in environments where the level of trust is relatively low and boosts cooperation in environments with a high level of trust.
Job creation should governments provide cooperatives with material and moral support and pave the way for job creation as one of the foundations of economic stability. This study aims to examine the situation of cooperatives benefiting from employment facilities is a rural stable in Ardabil province, the statistical population of which is rural cooperative companies active in Ardabil province. The results of interviews with 26 cooperatives receiving loans showed that 21 cooperatives were able to create employment in the cooperative after obtaining sustainable employment facilities, and this means a positive and effective impact of sustainable employment facilities, which is also the report and statistical data. Confirms that one of the other objectives of this study is to investigate the factors affecting the success and failure of cooperatives benefiting from sustainable rural employment facilities in Ardabil province, which were surveyed with a researcher-made questionnaire. In order to evaluate the reliability, we used Cronbach's alpha, which number 0.914 showed the reliability of the questionnaire used. This questionnaire was completed by 40 managers of cooperatives in the province and in four components to evaluate the factors affecting the performance and success of these cooperatives the use of factor analysis was discussed. According to the analysis of the results of the questionnaire, the component of improving participatory capabilities and motivational factors in the workplace has the greatest impact on the success and performance of rural cooperatives. The least score and impact has the improvement of internal management of cooperatives.
One of the basic axes of development is knowledge-oriented production activities. The high vulnerability of the agricultural sector, on one hand, and the high importance of this sector in providing food security, on the other hand, have caused agriculture in Iran to take a step towards becoming knowledge-based. In this regard, production cooperatives by consolidating small lands and applying correct management through the use of scientific methods and Tendency towards using new technology in production can provide the basis for increasing the productivity of this sector. Therefore, the current research was conducted with the aim of investigating the state of using new science and modern equipment in the agricultural sector and their effect on the efficiency of cooperatives.Methodology/approach: In this study, the types of efficiency of 29 rural production cooperative companies in Mazandaran province are measured using Data Envelopment Analysis method. For this purpose, DEAP2.1 software is used.Findings and conclusions: The results show that only 17.24% of the investigated cooperatives are efficient in terms of technical and scale, 31.03% in terms of management, 6.90% in terms of allocation and economy. Also, there is a big gap (82.10%) between the technical efficiency of knowledge- based cooperatives and resource- based cooperatives, so it is suggested that the managers of cooperatives in this province should set the cooperatives of Amol as their model and trying in benefiting from new science and technology in production.
Context and purpose. Cooperative organization is one of the most rational socio-economic tools ever designed by mankind, the sustainability of businesses created in the current state of the world economy, is important and necessary for any developing country like our dear country Iran. Therefore, the current research was conducted with the aim of ranking the strategies and consequences of business sustainability with the approach of entrepreneurship development in the successful cooperative sector of Hamedan province.Methodology/approach. This research is qualitative in terms of practical-developmental purpose and in terms of data collection. The statistical sample of the current research was selected by the number of 12 managers of successful cooperatives in Hamedan province and expert professors in the field of business using the snowball method based on theoretical saturation.Findings and conclusions. The results of the research indicate that reducing costs and financing, trying to survive, innovation in providing products and services, appropriate marketing strategies, appropriate production strategies, interaction with government organizations and appropriate interaction with human resources as concepts of strategies and strategies were known and likewise survival, despair, reproduction of defective culture and failure of production and cooperative sector were identified as concepts of consequences.Originality. Previous studies have mostly focused on business sustainability in cooperatives or strategies and consequences of business sustainability in organizations; meanwhile, the current study has a special focus on the strategies and consequences of business sustainability with the approach of entrepreneurship development in the successful cooperative sector of Hamedan province.
Abstract With the progress of artificial intelligence and the emergence of global online communities, humans and machines are increasingly participating in mixed collectives in which they can help or hinder each other. Human societies have had thousands of years to consolidate the social norms that promote cooperation; but mixed collectives often struggle to articulate the norms which hold when humans coexist with machines. In five studies involving 7917 individuals, we document the way people treat machines differently than humans in a stylized society of beneficiaries, helpers, punishers, and trustors. We show that a different amount of trust is gained by helpers and punishers when they follow norms over not doing so. We also demonstrate that the trust-gain of norm-followers is associated with trustors’ assessment about the consensual nature of cooperative norms over helping and punishing. Lastly, we establish that, under certain conditions, informing trustors about the norm-consensus over helping tends to decrease the differential treatment of both machines and people interacting with them. These results allow us to anticipate how humans may develop cooperative norms for human-machine collectives, specifically, by relying on already extant norms in human-only groups. We also demonstrate that this evolution may be accelerated by making people aware of their emerging consensus.
Using simulations between pairs of $ε$-greedy q-learners with one-period memory, this article demonstrates that the potential function of the stochastic replicator dynamics (Foster and Young, 1990) allows it to predict the emergence of error-proof cooperative strategies from the underlying parameters of the repeated prisoner's dilemma. The observed cooperation rates between q-learners are related to the ratio between the kinetic energy exerted by the polar attractors of the replicator dynamics under the grim trigger strategy. The frontier separating the parameter space conducive to cooperation from the parameter space dominated by defection can be found by setting the kinetic energy ratio equal to a critical value, which is a function of the discount factor, $f(δ) = δ/(1-δ)$, multiplied by a correction term to account for the effect of the algorithms' exploration probability. The gradient at the frontier increases with the distance between the game parameters and the hyperplane that characterizes the incentive compatibility constraint for cooperation under grim trigger. Building on literature from the neurosciences, which suggests that reinforcement learning is useful to understanding human behavior in risky environments, the article further explores the extent to which the frontier derived for q-learners also explains the emergence of cooperation between humans. Using metadata from laboratory experiments that analyze human choices in the infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma, the cooperation rates between humans are compared to those observed between q-learners under similar conditions. The correlation coefficients between the cooperation rates observed for humans and those observed for q-learners are consistently above $0.8$. The frontier derived from the simulations between q-learners is also found to predict the emergence of cooperation between humans.
With the development of autonomous driving, the improvement of autonomous driving technology for individual vehicles has reached the bottleneck. The advancement of vehicle-road cooperation autonomous driving technology can expand the vehicle's perception range, supplement the perception blind area and improve the perception accuracy, to promote the development of autonomous driving technology and achieve vehicle-road integration. This project mainly uses lidar to develop data fusion schemes to realize the sharing and combination of vehicle and road equipment data and achieve the detection and tracking of dynamic targets. At the same time, some test scenarios for the vehicle-road cooperative system were designed and used to test our vehicle-road cooperative awareness system, which proved the advantages of vehicle-road cooperative autonomous driving over single-vehicle autonomous driving.
Edoardo Gallo, Yohanes E. Riyanto, Nilanjan Roy
et al.
This paper examines experimentally how reputational uncertainty and the rate of change of the social environment determine cooperation. Reputational uncertainty significantly decreases cooperation, while a fast-changing social environment only causes a second-order qualitative increase in cooperation. At the individual level, reputational uncertainty induces more leniency and forgiveness in imposing network punishment through the link proposal and removal processes, inhibiting the formation of cooperative clusters. However, this effect is significant only in the fast-changing environment and not in the slow-changing environment. A substitution pattern between network punishment and action punishment (retaliatory defection) explains this discrepancy across the two social environments.
Kin selection plays a major role in the evolution of cooperative systems. However, many social species exhibit complex within‐group relatedness structures, where kin selection alone cannot explain the occurrence of cooperative behavior. Understanding such social structures is crucial to elucidate the evolution and maintenance of multi‐layered cooperative societies. In lamprologine cichlids, intragroup relatedness seems to correlate positively with reproductive skew, suggesting that in this clade dominants tend to provide reproductive concessions to unrelated subordinates to secure their participation in brood care. We investigate how patterns of within‐group relatedness covary with direct and indirect fitness benefits of cooperation in a highly social vertebrate, the cooperatively breeding, polygynous lamprologine cichlid Neolamprologus savoryi. Behavioral and genetic data from 43 groups containing 578 individuals show that groups are socially and genetically structured into subgroups. About 17% of group members were unrelated immigrants, and average relatedness between breeders and brood care helpers declined with helper age due to group membership dynamics. Hence the relative importance of direct and indirect fitness benefits of cooperation depends on helper age. Our findings highlight how both direct and indirect fitness benefits of cooperation and group membership can select for cooperative behavior in societies comprising complex social and relatedness structures.
The development of behaviors such as organizational justice, by increasing organizational obligations can be very effective in reducing administrative misconduct. The purpose of this study is to provide an effective model for reducing administrative misconduct among employees of agricultural production cooperatives with the mediating role of organizational commitment. The present study is applied in terms of purpose, descriptive-survey in terms of nature and method. To test the hypotheses, a 40-item questionnaire according to the Likert 7-choice spectrum was used. The statistical population of the study is the personnel of agricultural production cooperatives in Hamedan and Shiraz provinces with a total of 250 people. The statistical sample size of 148 people has been selected based on Krejcie and Morgan table by relative stratified method. The reliability of the analysis tool was confirmed using Cronbach's alpha coefficient and the validity of the tool was confirmed using construct validity through Lisrel software using confirmatory factor analysis. The path analysis model was used to analyze the findings and the Sobel test was used to analyze the mediating variable. The results showed that organizational justice and its components can have a negative and significant impact on administrative misconduct, directly and indirectly through organizational commitment.
hossein sotudeh arani, Abolfazl Baghbani arani, Yaser Maghsoudi-Ganjeh
et al.
Talent management is a new approach that can revolutionize the human resource management of cooperatives and eliminate the weaknesses and problems of their traditional approaches. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of talent management processes on networking capability and performance in cooperatives in Isfahan province. This research is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive-survey method. To collect the data, a 30-item questionnaire based on a sequential scale and a five-point Likert scale was used, the validity of which was confirmed by experts and its reliability was confirmed by calculating the Cronbach's alpha coefficient. The statistical population of the research is 580 managers of agricultural cooperatives in Isfahan province and the sample size was calculated using Krejcie Morgan table of 230 people who were selected by simple random sampling. SmartPLS software was used to analyze the data. The results showed that talent management processes including evaluation and discovery, absorption, retention and maintenance and development of organizational talent affect organizational performance. In addition, the impact of networking on the performance of agricultural cooperatives was confirmed.
Leila Tabrizi, Gholamhossein Abdollahzadeh, Mohammad Sharif Sharifzadeh
et al.
The present study was formulated in order to determine institutional capacity in participatory water management in Peyvand Cooperative in Aqqala. A survey method was adopted and data collection was carried out by using questionnaire. Target population included 102 experts and authorities in this initiative and data gathered based on a census. The validity and reliability of the questionnaires in terms of importance and status quo of institutional capacity were confirmed through experts’ opinions and Cronbach’s alpha, respectively. Institutional capacity was measured in 6 attributes and 62 items. The results obtained from components ranking revealed that the component “human capital”, “norms”, “provision of resources”, “management capacity”, “institutional integrity”, and “knowledge development and learning” were more important in participatory water management, respectively. Moreover, the results obtained from paired t-test indicated that the average of all components of institutional capacity during design and administration of participatory water management project in real setting is below the expected value. Furthermore, the results of one-sample t-test showed that the average of all the components is >3, which means the components of institutional capacity are in favorable level in administration of participatory water management project. The results acquired from the effect of institutional capacity on institutional effectiveness via multiple regression showed that six components of institutional capacity have positive and significant effect on institutional effectiveness. It is noteworthy that the component “management capacity” had the highest effect.
Mark Liu 劉彥廷, Shih-Fan Chan 詹仕凡, D. Rubenstein
et al.
Both benign and harsh environments promote the evolution of sociality. This paradox—societies occur in environments of such contrasting quality—may be explained by the different types of benefits that individuals receive from grouping: resource defense benefits that derive from group-defended critical resources versus collective action benefits that result from social cooperation among group members. Here, we investigate cooperative behavior in the burying beetle Nicrophorus nepalensis along an elevational gradient where environmental quality (climate and competition) varies with altitude. We show that climate (temperature) and competition (both intra- and interspecific) independently and synergistically influence sociality via different grouping benefits that vary along the gradient. At low elevations where interspecific competition for resources is intense, groups gain from the collective action benefit of increased interspecific competitive ability. In contrast, pairs have higher fitness at intermediate elevations where intraspecific competition for resources is greatest because resource defense is the key grouping benefit. However, groups and pairs have similar fitness at high elevations, suggesting that there is no grouping benefit in such physiologically challenging environments. Our results demonstrate that sociality is favored for different reasons under a range of environmental conditions, perhaps explaining why animal societies occur in environments of such contrasting quality.
Alexander Ehlert, Martin Kindschi, René Algesheimer
et al.
Significance How does society maintain the high levels of prosociality in humans, which are so puzzling to explain? Previous laboratory evidence suggests that human social networks play a critical role; however, if and how this role is played out in field settings is not well understood. We demonstrate that intrinsic social preferences, such as fairness and altruism, cluster and spread in human real-world friendship networks. More importantly, however, our findings show that individuals do not choose friends based on cooperativeness—friendship networks influence whether individuals become cooperative or selfish. We conclude that social learning contributes substantially to the ontogeny of prosociality, signifying the role of culture for the development and maintenance of large-scale human cooperation. While it is undeniable that the ability of humans to cooperate in large-scale societies is unique in animal life, it remains open how such a degree of prosociality is possible despite the risks of exploitation. Recent evidence suggests that social networks play a crucial role in the development of prosociality and large-scale cooperation by allowing cooperators to cluster; however, it is not well understood if and how this also applies to real-world social networks in the field. We study intrinsic social preferences alongside emerging friendship patterns in 57 freshly formed school classes (n = 1,217), using incentivized measures. We demonstrate the existence of cooperative clusters in society, examine their emergence, and expand the evidence from controlled experiments to real-world social networks. Our results suggest that being embedded in cooperative environments substantially enhances the social preferences of individuals, thus contributing to the formation of cooperative clusters. Partner choice, in contrast, only marginally contributes to their emergence. We conclude that cooperative preferences are contagious; social and cultural learning plays an important role in the development and evolution of cooperation.
Human societies are extraordinarily cooperative compared to those of most other animals. In the vast majority of species, individuals live solitary lives, meeting to only to mate and, sometimes, raise their young. In social species, cooperation is limited to relatives and (maybe) small groups of reciprocators. After a brief period of maternal support, individuals acquire virtually all of the food that they eat. There is little division of labor, no trade, and no large scale conflict. Communication is limited to a small repertoire of self-verifying signals. No one cares for the sick, or feeds the hungry or disabled. The strong take from the weak without fear of sanctions by third parties. Amend Hobbes to account for nepotism, and his picture of the state of nature is not so far off for most other animals. In contrast, people in even the simplest human societies regularly cooperate with many unrelated individuals. Human language allows low-cost honest communication of virtually unlimited complexity. The sick are cared for, and sharing leads to substantial flows of food from the middle aged to the young and old. Division of labor and trade are prominent features of every historically known human society, and archaeology indicates that they have a long history. Violent conflict among sizable groups is common. In every human society, social life is regulated by commonly held moral systems that specify the rights and duties of individuals enforced, albeit imperfectly, by third party sanctions.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the factors influencing on rural women participation in agricultural activities in the villages of Jiroft Township. A survey method was used to conduct this research. This research was a descriptive-correlative research. Statistical population of this research was rural women of Jiroft Township (N=38794). Krejice and Morgan Table was used to determine the sample size (n=380). A stratified random sampling method was implemented to select samples. The data collection tool was a structured questionnaire that its validity confirmed by a panel of experts. Furthermore, in order to assess the reliability of the research tool, Cronbach's alpha coefficient was calculated to test the reliability of different parts of questionnaire (0.73≤α≤0.82). Descriptive statistics results showed that women's participation in agricultural activities is high. The results of correlation analysis showed that economic, social, attitude, cultural, motivation, education and extension, educational level of women, household size and women's age factors have significant relationship on women participation in agricultural activities. Multiple-regression results showed that independent variables 67 percent of dependent variable were explained.
alireza shahbazi, Hasanali Jahantigh, amirhamze shahbazi
et al.
The aim of the present study is to investigate the role of Hamoon Lake’s environmental capabilities on the socio-economic development of rural areas of Sistan.The method of this research is descriptive- analytical and the required data were obtained through completing questionnaires and field study.To determine the sample size,Cochran sampling method(with error of 0.8) was used,and out of 600 rural households,120 supervisors were randomly interviewed.Also,10 agricultural experts from the region were interviewed, using available sampling.Descriptive statistics; frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation; and t-test were used to analyze the research data in SPSS software.Also,the VICOR ranking model was used for spatial analysis of the villages and finally the Fuzzy AHP model was applied to investigate the environmental impact factor in sistan.The results of the t-test showed that the environmental capabilities of Lake Hamoon had a significant effect on the economic and social sustainability of the studied villages of sistan,so that in both dimensions, the mean dimensions were higher than the theoretical median (3). Economic and livelihoods (4%) and socio-cultural (3.89%) were the highest,respectively. According to the results of the VICOR ranking technique, the Lourg va Bagh village with coefficient (Q =./…) is the best village to use environmental potentials in sistan. The results of Fazzy AHP technique showed that among the known capabilities, high groundwater level(0.48%) was the most important environmental power in sistan and the need for no fertilization (0.3%) was the least important factor.