Hybrid Human-Agent Social Dilemmas in Energy Markets

ArXi:2603.11834v1 Announce Type: cross In hybrid populations where humans delegate strategic decision-making to autonomous agents, understanding when and how cooperative behaviors can emerge remains a key challenge. We study this problem in the context of energy load management: consumer agents schedule their appliance use under demand-dependent pricing. This structure can create a social dilemma where everybody would benefit from coordination, but in equilibrium agents often choose to incur the congestion costs that cooperative turn-taking would avoid.