Institutions, rules, and equilibria: a unified theory

Abstract

Abstract. We propose a new framework to unify three conceptions of institutions that play a prominent role in the philosophical and scientific literature: the equilibria account, the regulative rules account, and the constitutive rules account. We argue that equilibrium-based and rule-based accounts are individually inadequate, but that jointly they provide a satisfactory conception of institutions as rules-in-equilibrium. In the second part of the paper we show that constitutive rules can be derived from regulative rules via the introduction of theoretical terms. We argue that the constitutive rules theory is reducible to the rules-in equilibrium theory, and that it accounts for the way in which we assign names to social institutions.

On defining institutions: rulesversusequilibria

“…Although, Hindriks and Guala (2014) make reference to some of the philosophical literature on definition, I suggest that their article is more concerned with understanding the general nature of institutions, rather than defining them. I propose that these two tasks are related but basically different.…”

Community-Based Reasoning in Games: Salience, Rule-Following, and Counterfactuals

“…However, for all other worlds w ∈ [e], the model indeed expresses aspects of practical reasoning that do not materialize at the behavioral level. This distinguishes my approach with respect to some recent game-theoretic accounts of institutions in social ontology and economics [36,37]. This also naturally leads to consider a related issue that arises from my account of CBR: the kind of epistemic and causal dependence that is implied.…”

Three Conceptions of a Theory of Institutions

“…He argues that this approach unifies the two approaches found in economics, suggesting that institutions "are better conceived as rules that people have an incentive to follow" (2016, 10). Second, he suggests that a number of ideas developed in social ontology -Frank Hindriks' reductive theory of constitutive rules (Hindriks and Guala 2014;Guala and Hindriks 2015;Hindriks 2005Hindriks , 2009, David Lewis' (1969) account of conventions, and the incentivized action theory du Plessis 2014, 2011) -could be combined with the rules-in-equilibrium approach. Hindriks' argument allows him to reduce Searle's constitutive rules to ordinary regulative rules.…”