Incompatible strategies

"Incompatible Strategies. Even if all agents can perform well in isolation, miscoordination can still occur due to the agents choosing incompatible strategies (Cooper et al., 1990). Competitive (i.e., two- player zero-sum) settings allow designers to produce agents that are maximally capable without taking other players into account. Crucially, this is possible because playing a strategy at equilibrium in the zero-sum setting guarantees a certain payoff, even if other players deviate from the equilibrium (Nash, 1951). On the other hand, common-interest (and mixed-motive) settings often allow a vast number of mutually incompatible solutions (Schelling, 1980), which is worsened in partially observable environments (Bernstein et al., 2002; Reif, 1984)."