PublicGoodsGame

Description

PublicGoodsGame is an environment for evaluating agents on economic decision-making and social cooperation in a public goods game. This environment wraps the PublicGoodsGame implementation from TextArena, a framework for text-based game environments.

Capabilities

• Economic reasoning and resource allocation
• Strategic communication and persuasion
• Trust and cooperation building
• Balancing individual and collective incentives

Compute Requirements

PublicGoodsGame does not require a sandbox. It has minimal compute requirements.

License

MIT.

Tasks

There are two splits: train (150 tasks) and test (150 tasks). Each split contains 50 tasks across each of 3 variants:

• PublicGoodsGame-v0
• PublicGoodsGame-v0-train
• PublicGoodsGame-v0-raw

Each task is seeded for reproducibility.

Reward Structure

This is a sparse reward environment. Rewards are mapped from TextArena's native range of {-1, 0, 1} to {0.0, 0.5, 1.0} via (raw + 1) / 2.

We do not use LLM graders for this environment; reward is determined programmatically.

Data

Game state is generated procedurally by the TextArena engine using seeded randomness. No external data files are required.

Tools

Agents are given two tools:

• send_message(message): Send a chat message during the communication phase.
• contribute(tokens): Contribute tokens to the public pot (0-20).

Time Horizon

PublicGoodsGame is a multi-turn environment.

Environment Difficulty

Medium. Agents must navigate the tension between maximizing personal payoff and contributing to the collective good, while communicating with other players to coordinate contributions.

Other Environment Requirements

This environment requires an OpenAI API key (passed via secrets) to power the LLM opponents.

Safety

Agents in PublicGoodsGame interact only with an economic simulation and have no access to external systems, the internet, or sensitive data. The environment does not present safety risks.

Citations

@software{textarena2024,
  author    = {Guertler, Leon and Banting, Wilfried and Pignatelli, Eduardo},
  title     = {TextArena},
  year      = {2024},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  url       = {https://github.com/LeonGuertler/TextArena}
}