mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Evaluating Cooperation in LLM Social Groups through Elected Leadership

arXiv 2604.11721 ↗First posted 13 Apr 2026cs.CL cs.AI cs.LGcited by 3

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Abstract (arXiv)

Governing common-pool resources requires agents to develop enduring strategies through cooperation and self-governance to avoid collective failure. While foundation models have shown potential for cooperation in these settings, existing multi-agent research provides little insight into whether structured leadership and election mechanisms can improve collective decision making. The lack of such a critical organizational feature ubiquitous in human society presents a significant shortcoming of the current methods. In this work we aim to directly address whether leadership and elections can support improved social welfare and cooperation through multi-agent simulation with LLMs. We present our open-source framework that simulates leadership through elected personas and candidate-driven agendas and carry out an empirical study of LLMs under controlled governance conditions. Our experiments demonstrate that having elected leadership improves social welfare scores by 55.4% and survival time by 128.6% across a range of high performing LLMs. Through the construction of an agent social graph we compute centrality metrics to assess the social influence of leader personas and also analyze rhetorical and cooperative tendencies revealed through a sentiment analysis on leader utterances. This work lays the foundation for further study of election mechanisms in multi-agent systems toward navigating complex social dilemmas.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 27 of its 83 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2026.

Builds on

27 of 83 references.

References · 27

  1. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
  2. 2024Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preferencecited by 1,151
  3. 2024LLMs-as-Judges: A Comprehensive Survey on LLM-based Evaluation Methodscited by 451
  4. 2023LMSYS-Chat-1M: A Large-Scale Real-World LLM Conversation Datasetcited by 449
  5. 2023Harnessing the Power of LLMs in Practice: A Survey on ChatGPT and Beyondcited by 409
  6. 2022Social Simulacra: Creating Populated Prototypes for Social Computing Systemscited by 300
  7. 2017Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning in Sequential Social Dilemmascited by 206
  8. 2018Learning Attentional Communication for Multi-Agent Cooperationcited by 170
  9. 2020Open Problems in Cooperative AIcited by 167
  10. 2024Large language models that replace human participants can harmfully misportray and flatten identity groupscited by 137
  11. 2024Cooperate or Collapse: Emergence of Sustainable Cooperation in a Society of LLM Agentscited by 120
  12. 2023Generative agent-based modeling with actions grounded in physical, social, or digital space using Concordiacited by 119
15 more
  1. 2024Systematic Biases in LLM Simulations of Debatescited by 98
  2. 2025LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research Methodcited by 97
  3. 2024Embodied LLM Agents Learn to Cooperate in Organized Teamscited by 81
  4. 2024Scaling Laws for Predicting Downstream Performance in LLMscited by 48
  5. 2024Language Model Alignment in Multilingual Trolley Problemscited by 46
  6. 2024Thinking LLMs: General Instruction Following with Thought Generationcited by 45
  7. 2025Synthetic Socratic Debates: Examining Persona Effects on Moral Decision and Persuasion Dynamicscited by 19
  8. 2024Vox Populi, Vox AI? Using Language Models to Estimate German Public Opinioncited by 13
  9. 2025Are Language Models Consequentialist or Deontological Moral Reasoners?cited by 12
  10. 2025Using Large Language Models to Simulate Human Behavioural Experiments: Port of Marscited by 5
  11. 2025CORE: Measuring Multi-Agent LLM Interaction Quality under Game-Theoretic Pressurescited by 5
  12. 2026GT-HarmBench: Benchmarking AI Safety Risks Through the Lens of Game Theorycited by 5
  13. 2021The social dilemma in artificial intelligence development and why we have to solve itcited by 4
  14. 2018An Analysis of Centrality Measures for Complex and Social Networkscited by 2
  15. 2018A Systematic Framework and Characterization of Influence-Based Network Centralitycited by 1

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

  1. 2026PAVE: A Cognitive Architecture for Legitimate Violation in Generative Agent Societiescited by 0
  2. 2026From Certain Doom to Survival: Agent-Driven Self-Governance in LLM Agent Societiescited by 0
  3. 2026Prompted Identity Degrades Cooperation in Multi-Agent LLM Systemscited by 0