Upon starting a collective endeavour, it is important to understand your partners’ preferences and how strongly they commit to a common goal. Establishing a prior commitment or agreement in terms of posterior benefits and consequences from those engaging in it provides an important mechanism for securing cooperation. Resorting to methods from Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT), here we analyse how prior commitments can also be adopted as a tool for enhancing coordination when its outcomes exhibit an asymmetric payoff structure, in both pairwise and multi-party interactions. Arguably, coordination is more complex to achieve than cooperation since there might be several desirable collective outcomes in a coordination problem (compared to mutual cooperation, the only desirable collective outcome in cooperation dilemmas). Our analysis, both analytically and via numerical simulations, shows that whether prior commitment would be a viable evolutionary mechanism for enhancing coordination and the overall population social welfare strongly depends on the collective benefit and severity of competition, and more importantly, how asymmetric benefits are resolved in a commitment deal. Moreover, in multi-party interactions, prior commitments prove to be crucial when a high level of group diversity is required for optimal coordination. The results are robust for different selection intensities. Overall, our analysis provides new insights into the complexity and beauty of behavioural evolution driven by humans’ capacity for commitment, as well as for the design of self-organised and distributed multi-agent systems for ensuring coordination among autonomous agents.

开始集体努力后，重要的是要了解合作伙伴的偏好以及他们对共同目标的坚定承诺。根据事后利益和后果建立事前承诺或协议，为确保合作提供了重要的机制。借助进化博弈论（EGT）的方法，在这里我们分析了在成对和多方互动中，当先期承诺的结果表现出不对称的收益结构时，先前的承诺又如何可以用作增强协调的工具。可以说，协调要比合作要复杂得多，因为在协调问题中可能会有一些合意的集体结果（与相互合作相比，这是合作困境中唯一合意的集体结果）。我们的分析 无论是从分析上还是通过数值模拟，都表明，先前的承诺是否将是增强协调的可行的进化机制，以及整个人口的社会福利在很大程度上取决于集体利益和竞争的严重性，更重要的是，如何解决承诺中的不对称利益交易。此外，在多方交互中，当需要高水平的组多样性才能实现最佳协调时，事先的承诺就显得至关重要。结果对于不同的选择强度是可靠的。总体而言，我们的分析为人类承诺能力驱动的行为进化的复杂性和美观性提供了新的见解，并为确保自主代理之间的协调而设计了自组织和分布式多代理系统。