Social welfare optimisation under institutional reward and punishment

ArXi:2605.31330v1 Announce Type: cross Institutional incentives are widely used to promote cooperation among autonomous, self-regarding agents, from human societies to multi-agent and AI systems. Existing work typically treats incentive design as a bi-objective problem: minimise institutional cost while achieving a high long-run frequency of cooperation. Whether such schemes also maximise social welfare - total population payoff net of institutional expenditure - has remained largely unexplored.