Delegation to AI in social dilemmas

As AI systems become more integrated into decision-making, it is increasingly important to understand how delegation to AI affects behavior in social dilemmas and what drives people to delegate their choices to AI. Building on previous findings that delegation can increase prosocial behavior in a collective-risk dilemma setting, we investigate whether these effects generalize across different dilemmas and types of AI agents. A second key goal is to examine what factors lead people to choose delegation after experiencing both delegation and self-play. To this end, we conducted a preregistered experimental program across three social dilemmas: the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Snowdrift, and the Stag-Hunt Game. Each participant made decisions under three modes: self-play, mandatory delegation, and optional delegation. The design crossed two factors: (1) Delegation order (delegation-first vs. self-play-first, with all participants ending in optional delegation), and (2) AI agent type, where four modes of delegation were tested: rule-based, goal-oriented, supervised-learning, and LLM-based agents. This yielded eight treatment conditions per game. Each condition included N = 100 participants, yielding a total sample size of N = 2400 across all three social dilemmas. We found that delegation generally decreases cooperation. Most importantly, participants’ delegation choices in the optional phase were strongly associated with whether they earned more money when delegating or when deciding for themselves. In other words, participants were more likely to delegate again when delegation yielded higher payoffs and less likely to delegate when self-play had been more profitable, even though they could freely program the agents to their preferences. Together, these findings provide the most systematic evidence to date on how delegation influences prosocial behavior across various social dilemmas. They also highlight that delegation is not a fixed preference but a strategic payoff-driven choice, shaped directly by individuals’ past experiences with delegation versus self-play.