Importantly, this idea suggests a general principle of multi-agent Power I’ll call power-scarcity: in multi-agent games, gaining power tends to come at the expense of another player losing power.
We conjecture this? We’ve only proven limiting cases so far, (constant-sum, and strongly suspected for common-payoff), but we’re still working on formulating a more general claim.
After thinking about it more, I don’t necessarily see a reason that wouldn’t be the case (in theory) for games.
My initial reaction was based on considering ‘life’ as opposed to games, i.e. in a complicated environment new ideas (or ones which require resources or knowledge) might open up more options. (For instance the idea of futures might make an impact, but it seems someone has to think of it, as opposed to it existing as a ‘move’ in a ‘game’.) Of course, dynamics where collaboration increases possible utility, can coexist with dynamics where conflict does, so this might be rare, or require coming up with such ~games* intentionally.
*I’m not sure this is a property of games, in theory, though. The world has more ‘discovery’ going on.
Does this hold in games that aren’t constant sum?
We conjecture this? We’ve only proven limiting cases so far, (constant-sum, and strongly suspected for common-payoff), but we’re still working on formulating a more general claim.
After thinking about it more, I don’t necessarily see a reason that wouldn’t be the case (in theory) for games.
My initial reaction was based on considering ‘life’ as opposed to games, i.e. in a complicated environment new ideas (or ones which require resources or knowledge) might open up more options. (For instance the idea of futures might make an impact, but it seems someone has to think of it, as opposed to it existing as a ‘move’ in a ‘game’.) Of course, dynamics where collaboration increases possible utility, can coexist with dynamics where conflict does, so this might be rare, or require coming up with such ~games* intentionally.
*I’m not sure this is a property of games, in theory, though. The world has more ‘discovery’ going on.