Open-Strategy Transparency

Each agent's decision strategy is written as a natural-language document that every other participant can read before an interaction; an LLM adjudicator interprets one agent's decision in light of the other's published strategy, so conditionally cooperative strategies can be verified from the text itself rather than inferred from past behaviour.

Properties

family: Evaluation & Ranking
maturity: emerging
diagram: tournament
whyMultiAgent: Mutual inspection of decision procedures only has meaning between distinct parties; a single agent has no counterpart's strategy document to read. The paper's dominance result, that conditional cooperation beats unconditional strategies specifically when procedures are mutually visible, is a property of a round-robin tournament among many independently authored strategies, not of any one agent's reasoning. Distinct from the already-tracked competitive-arena pattern, which injects an agent's own standing and its opponent's standing (a numeric rank) into the prompt to shape strategy: here what is made visible is the full text of the counterpart's decision procedure, not a rank, and the paper's finding is that transparency of strategy itself, not competitive standing, is what makes conditional cooperation dominate. Also distinct from negotiation-equilibrium, where per-agent hidden state and opposing utilities are what produce strategic tension: here the mechanism is the opposite, strategies are fully visible, and that visibility is what stabilises cooperation.
mast: [Cat 2]
useCases: [Agent marketplaces where trust must be established without a track record][Multi-agent negotiation protocols that pre-commit to a visible decision rule][Mechanism design for cooperative agent economies]
source: The Open-Strategy Dictator Game: Cooperation Under Mutual Transparency · arXiv:2608.14913

Provenance

Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14913

Open-Strategy Transparency

Properties

family

Evaluation & Ranking

maturity

emerging

diagram

tournament

whyMultiAgent

Mutual inspection of decision procedures only has meaning between distinct parties; a single agent has no counterpart's strategy document to read. The paper's dominance result, that conditional cooperation beats unconditional strategies specifically when procedures are mutually visible, is a property of a round-robin tournament among many independently authored strategies, not of any one agent's reasoning. Distinct from the already-tracked competitive-arena pattern, which injects an agent's own standing and its opponent's standing (a numeric rank) into the prompt to shape strategy: here what is made visible is the full text of the counterpart's decision procedure, not a rank, and the paper's finding is that transparency of strategy itself, not competitive standing, is what makes conditional cooperation dominate. Also distinct from negotiation-equilibrium, where per-agent hidden state and opposing utilities are what produce strategic tension: here the mechanism is the opposite, strategies are fully visible, and that visibility is what stabilises cooperation.

mast

[Cat 2]

useCases

[Agent marketplaces where trust must be established without a track record][Multi-agent negotiation protocols that pre-commit to a visible decision rule][Mechanism design for cooperative agent economies]

source

The Open-Strategy Dictator Game: Cooperation Under Mutual Transparency · arXiv:2608.14913