{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,30]],"date-time":"2026-09-30T19:35:03Z","timestamp":1790796903813,"version":"4.1.0"},"reference-count":71,"publisher":"SAGE Publications","issue":"3","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2021,2,17]],"date-time":"2021-02-17T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1613520000000},"content-version":"unspecified","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"Leverhulme Research Fellowship","award":["RF-2020-603\/9"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["RF-2020-603\/9"]}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/100017561","name":"Future of Life Institute","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","award":["RFP2-154"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["RFP2-154"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100017561","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"crossref"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":["journals.sagepub.com"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Adaptive Behavior"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2022,6]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>Upon starting a collective endeavour, it is important to understand your partners\u2019 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\u2019 capacity for commitment, as well as for the design of self-organised and distributed multi-agent systems for ensuring coordination among autonomous agents.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1177\/1059712321993166","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,2,21]],"date-time":"2021-02-21T00:31:07Z","timestamp":1613867467000},"page":"257-277","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/sage-journals-update-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":30,"title":["Evolution of coordination in pairwise and multi-player interactions via prior commitments"],"prefix":"10.1177","volume":"30","author":[{"given":"Ndidi Bianca","family":"Ogbo","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computing, Engineering & Digital Technologies, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Aiman","family":"Elragig","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computing, Engineering & Digital Technologies, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3095-7714","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"The Anh","family":"Han","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computing, Engineering & Digital Technologies, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"179","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,2,17]]},"reference":[{"key":"bibr1-1059712321993166","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/MTS.2018.2876107"},{"key":"bibr2-1059712321993166","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.newideapsych.2018.12.005"},{"key":"bibr3-1059712321993166","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1080\/07421222.2004.11045803"},{"key":"bibr4-1059712321993166","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1093\/acprof:oso\/9780199211890.001.0001"},{"key":"bibr5-1059712321993166","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1073\/pnas.1604989113"},{"issue":"2","key":"bibr6-1059712321993166","first-page":"43","volume":"33","author":"Beede D. 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