How humans establish communication in non-zero-sum game environment

We are investigating on how to build a human-agent interface based on mind-reading mechanism. The research on the emergence of communication sheds light on mind-reading mechanism. However, theses researches so far are conducted only in cooperative environment. We investigated how communication emerges using a series of non-zero-sum games as a task. The task is such that the conflict of interests exists but cooperation is necessary for overall good performance. The only communication media is sending of monotonic sound. For comparison, the experiments are also conducted on soundless condition, i.e., no communication is possible between the players. It is confirmed that the existence of communication media improved the performance even under the conflict of interests. On sound condition, some of the subjects could establish communication and earned nearly optimal points. But others could not communicate well with the partner, and eventually could earn only small points. The task is very simple but various strategies for communication could be observed. The emergence of varieties of strategies is a key point for understanding of mind-reading mechanism.