Pith Number

pith:J3VBC3WO

pith:2026:J3VBC3WOJNBD6GVMDZOSVBNNRV

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Mechanism Design Is Not Enough: Prosocial Agents for Cooperative AI

Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Charlie Tharas, Emanuele La Malfa, Samuele Marro, Van Q. Truong, Xuanqiang Angelo Huang, Zhijing Jin

Incomplete contracts create welfare losses no mechanism can eliminate, but prosocial agents can close the gap.

arxiv:2605.08426 v2 · 2026-05-08 · cs.GT · cs.AI

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{J3VBC3WOJNBD6GVMDZOSVBNNRV}

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Record completeness

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2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

drawing from incomplete contract theory, we formally show that when contracts cannot distinguish all relevant future contingencies, there is a strictly positive welfare loss that no realistic mechanism can eliminate. We show that prosocial agents... can close this gap and achieve outcomes that are socially superior and individually beneficial.

C2weakest assumption

That the formal model of incomplete contracts transfers directly to LLM agents without additional frictions, and that prosocial weighting can be implemented in a way that remains individually rational and stable across interactions.

C3one line summary

Mechanism design leaves a strictly positive welfare loss under incomplete contracts for AI agents, but prosocial agents close this gap and improve social welfare.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-03T01:05:51.057474Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

4eea116ece4b423f1aac1e5d2a85ad8d78595544e6d283860649f34ad14e4a81

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.08426 · arxiv_version: 2605.08426v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.08426 · pith_short_12: J3VBC3WOJNBD · pith_short_16: J3VBC3WOJNBD6GVM · pith_short_8: J3VBC3WO

Agent API

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/J3VBC3WOJNBD6GVMDZOSVBNNRV \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 4eea116ece4b423f1aac1e5d2a85ad8d78595544e6d283860649f34ad14e4a81

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "ee0047e7512d40279aede3185d81d87ba84212942267a14a857f3827debf602f",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.AI"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.GT",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-08T19:37:07Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "44c8885a4c3665c15985c0613c283878e56f1543a33b5f4a92c342c42e162172"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.08426",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}