While trust and group size in socio-economic processes have been well investigated separately, approaches to synergize them have been rare. After addressing basic conditions for institutionalized cooperation, the agency capability of preferential mixing is introduced in order to determine the carrier group of an institution of cooperation. That platform typically assumes a meso-size smaller than the initial arena. Habituation and generalization within and across overlapping platforms then may lead to first contextual trust. This has to be carried over from individual platforms into the larger public of the whole economy to constitute general trust. The practical relevance of this analysis is illustrated through the fact that even superficially similar economies show different socio-economic performance and trajectories. Our results suggest investigating their inner deep structure of overlapping meso-sized platforms as a critical factor.
We investigate aspects of institutional change in an evolutionary game-theoretic framework, in principle focusing on problems of coordination in groups when new solutions to a problem become available. In an evolutionary game with an underlying dilemma structure, we let a number of new strategies become gradually available to the agents. The dilemma structure of the situation is not changed by these. Older strategies offer a lesser payoff than newly available ones. The problem that agents have to solve for realizing improved results is, therefore, to coordinate on newly available strategies. Strategies are taken to represent institutions; the coordination on a new strategy by agents, hence, represents a change in the institutional framework of a group. The simulations we run show a stable pattern regarding such institutional changes. A number of institutions are found to coexist, with the specific number depending on the relation of payoffs achievable through the coordination of different strategies. Usually, the strategies leading to the highest possible payoff are not among these. This can be taken to reflect the heterogeneity of rules in larger groups, with different subgroups showing different behavior patterns
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