The Coordination Gap: Multi-Agent Alternation Metrics for Temporal Fairness in Repeated Games
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| author | Papadopoulos, Nikolaos Al. Psannis, Konstantinos |
| author_facet | Papadopoulos, Nikolaos Al. Psannis, Konstantinos |
| contents | Multi-agent coordination dilemmas expose a fundamental tension between individual optimization and collective welfare, yet characterizing such coordination requires metrics sensitive to temporal structure and collective dynamics. As a diagnostic testbed, we study a BoE-derived multi-agent variant of the Battle of the Exes, formalizing it as a Markov game in which turn-taking emerges as a periodic coordination regime. Conventional outcome-based metrics (e.g., efficiency and min/max fairness) are temporally blind (they cannot distinguish structured alternation from monopolistic or random access patterns) and fairness ratios lose discriminative power as n grows, obscuring inequities.
To address this limitation, we introduce Perfect Alternation (PA) as a reference coordination regime and propose six novel Alternation (ALT) metrics designed as temporally sensitive observables of coordination quality. Using Q-learning agents as a minimal adaptive diagnostic baseline, and comparing against random-policy null processes, we uncover a clear measurement failure: despite exhibiting deceptively high traditional metrics (e.g., reward fairness often exceeding 0.9), learned policies perform up to 81% below random baselines under ALT-variant evaluation, a deficit already present in the two-agent case and intensifying as n grows.
These results demonstrate, in this setting, that high aggregate payoffs can coexist with poor temporal coordination, and that conventional metrics may severely mischaracterize emergent dynamics. Our findings underscore the necessity of temporally aware observables for analyzing coordination in multi-agent games and highlight random-policy baselines as essential null processes for interpreting coordination outcomes relative to chance-level behavior. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_05789 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | The Coordination Gap: Multi-Agent Alternation Metrics for Temporal Fairness in Repeated Games Papadopoulos, Nikolaos Al. Psannis, Konstantinos Multiagent Systems Computer Science and Game Theory Machine Learning 91A20, 68T05, 91B14 I.2.11; I.2.6; J.4 Multi-agent coordination dilemmas expose a fundamental tension between individual optimization and collective welfare, yet characterizing such coordination requires metrics sensitive to temporal structure and collective dynamics. As a diagnostic testbed, we study a BoE-derived multi-agent variant of the Battle of the Exes, formalizing it as a Markov game in which turn-taking emerges as a periodic coordination regime. Conventional outcome-based metrics (e.g., efficiency and min/max fairness) are temporally blind (they cannot distinguish structured alternation from monopolistic or random access patterns) and fairness ratios lose discriminative power as n grows, obscuring inequities. To address this limitation, we introduce Perfect Alternation (PA) as a reference coordination regime and propose six novel Alternation (ALT) metrics designed as temporally sensitive observables of coordination quality. Using Q-learning agents as a minimal adaptive diagnostic baseline, and comparing against random-policy null processes, we uncover a clear measurement failure: despite exhibiting deceptively high traditional metrics (e.g., reward fairness often exceeding 0.9), learned policies perform up to 81% below random baselines under ALT-variant evaluation, a deficit already present in the two-agent case and intensifying as n grows. These results demonstrate, in this setting, that high aggregate payoffs can coexist with poor temporal coordination, and that conventional metrics may severely mischaracterize emergent dynamics. Our findings underscore the necessity of temporally aware observables for analyzing coordination in multi-agent games and highlight random-policy baselines as essential null processes for interpreting coordination outcomes relative to chance-level behavior. |
| title | The Coordination Gap: Multi-Agent Alternation Metrics for Temporal Fairness in Repeated Games |
| topic | Multiagent Systems Computer Science and Game Theory Machine Learning 91A20, 68T05, 91B14 I.2.11; I.2.6; J.4 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05789 |