  A wide class of dilatation symmetric effective actions in higher dimensions
leads to a vanishing four-dimensional cosmological constant. This requires no
tuning of parameters and results from the absence of an allowed potential for
the scalar dilaton field. The field equations admit many solutions with flat
four-dimensional space and non-vanishing gauge couplings. In a more general
setting, these are candidates for asymptotic states of cosmological runaway
solutions, where dilatation symmetry is realized dynamically if a fixed point
is approached as time goes to infinity. Dilatation anomalies during the runaway
can lift the degeneracy of solutions and lead to an observable dynamical dark
energy.
