# Bosses, Kings, and the Commons: Cooperation Under Power Asymmetry in LLM Societies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29062 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29062/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06899/) (2022)
- [Generative agent-based modeling with actions grounded in physical, social, or digital space using Concordia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03664/) (2023)
- [Cooperate or Collapse: Emergence of Sustainable Cooperation in a Society of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16698/) (2024)
- [GTBench: Uncovering the Strategic Reasoning Limitations of LLMs via Game-Theoretic Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12348/) (2024)
- [Secret Collusion among AI Agents: Multi-Agent Deception via Steganography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07510/) (2024)
- [Generative Language Models Exhibit Social Identity Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15819/) (2023)
- [Cooperation, Competition, and Maliciousness: LLM-Stakeholders Interactive Negotiation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17234/) (2023)
- [SimBench: Benchmarking the Ability of Large Language Models to Simulate Human Behaviors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17516/) (2025)
- [Will Systems of LLM Agents Cooperate: An Investigation into a Social Dilemma](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16173/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Draining the Energy Commons: Self-Defeating Over-Appropriation as a Coordination Failure in Agentic LLM Collectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22188/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Communities can sustainably manage shared resources (commons) through self-governance and cooperative norms, a central finding of Ostrom's theory of self-governance. However, real-world commons (e.g., fisheries, forests, and irrigation systems) are often governed under asymmetric power structures, where certain individuals or institutions possess disproportionate control over resource extraction and collective outcomes. As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as agents in synthetic governance simulations, understanding how LLM societies behave under asymmetric power structures is becoming increasingly important, yet existing evaluations largely ignore such asymmetries. We introduce Sovereignty over the Commons Simulation (SovSim), a generative multi-agent simulation framework that incorporates an agent with asymmetric power (boss or king) into a society of symmetric agents (workers or peasants), where all agents extract from a shared resource, collectively determining its sustainability over time. Across eleven state-of-the-art models, we find that introducing asymmetric power leads to severe breakdowns in cooperation and sustainability, with up to an 87.3% degradation in survival rate relative to symmetric settings.