It is a recurring requirement in open systems, such as networks, distributed systems, and socio-technical systems, that a group of agents must coordinate their behaviour for the common good. In those systems—where agents are heterogeneous—unexpected behaviour can occur due to errors or malice. Agents whose practices free-ride the system can be accepted to a certain level; however, not only do they put the stability of the system at risk, but they also compromise the agents that behave according to the system’s rules. In social systems, it has been observed that social capital is an attribute of individuals that enhances their ability to solve collective action problems. Sociologists have studied collective action through human societies and observed that social capital plays an important role in maintaining communities though time as well as in simplifying the decision-making in them. In this work, we explore the use of Electronic Social Capital for optimising self-organised collective action. We developed a context-independent Electronic Social Capital framework to test this hypothesis. The framework comprises a set of handlers that capture events from the system and update three different forms of social capital: trustworthiness, networks, and institutions. Later, a set of metrics are generated by the forms of social capital and used for decision-making. The framework was tested in different scenarios such as two-player games, n -player games, and public goods games. The experimental results show that social capital optimises the outcomes (in terms of long-term satisfaction and utility), reduces the complexity of decision-making, and scales with the size of the population. This work proposes an alternative solution using Electronic Social Capital to represent and reason with qualitative, instead of traditional quantitative, values. This solution could be embedded into socio-technical systems to incentivise collective action without commodifying the resources or actions in the system.

中文翻译：

---

自组织多智能体系统的电子社会资本

在网络、分布式系统和社会技术系统等开放系统中，一组代理必须协调他们的行为以实现共同利益，这是一个反复出现的要求。在那些代理是异构的系统中，由于错误或恶意可能会发生意外行为。实践搭便车系统的代理人可以被接受到一定程度；但是，它们不仅会危及系统的稳定性，还会危及根据系统规则行事的代理。在社会系统中，观察到社会资本是个人的一种属性，可以增强他们解决集体行动问题的能力。社会学家通过人类社会研究了集体行动，并观察到社会资本在长期维持社区以及简化社区决策方面发挥着重要作用。在这项工作中，我们探索使用电子社会资本来优化自组织的集体行动。我们开发了一个与上下文无关的电子社会资本框架来检验这一假设。该框架包含一组处理程序，这些处理程序从系统中捕获事件并更新三种不同形式的社会资本：可信度、网络和机构。之后，以社会资本的形式产生一组指标，用于决策。n-玩家游戏和公共物品游戏。实验结果表明，社会资本优化了结果（在长期满意度和效用方面），降低了决策的复杂性，并随着人口规模的增加而增加。这项工作提出了一种替代解决方案，使用电子社会资本来表示和推理定性价值，而不是传统的定量价值。该解决方案可以嵌入到社会技术系统中，以激励集体行动，而不会将系统中的资源或行动商品化。