Abstract
This chapter summarizes two main views on norms and games as emerging in literature on game theory, social science, philosophy and artificial intelligence. The first view originates in the field of mechanism design or implementation theory and characterizes norms as mechanisms enforcing desirable social properties in classes of games. According to the second view, originating from work in the social sciences and evolutionary game theory, norms are studied via the notion of equilibrium and are viewed as emergent social contracts or conventions.
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Notes
- 1.
We will often use the terms “norm” and “institution” as synonyms.
- 2.
The phrase comes, as far as we know, from North (1990).
- 3.
New institutional economics has brought institutions and norms to the agenda of modern economics, viewing them as the social and legal frameworks of economic behavior. See Coase (1960) for a representative paper.
- 4.
- 5.
This problematic assumption has been put under discussion extensively in Hurwicz (2008).
- 6.
See Parikh (2002) for an inspiring manifesto.
- 7.
This fundamental distinction has been emphasized, for instance, in Hurwicz (1996).
- 8.
It might be worth stressing that the two views are not incompatible as institutions as equilibria can be thought of arising within games defined on institutions as game forms.
- 9.
Self-enforcement is the type of phenomenon captured by the so-called folk theorem. The theorem roughly says that, given a game, any outcome which guarantees to each player a payoff at least as good as the one guaranteed by her minimax strategy is a Nash equilibrium in the indefinite iteration of the initial game (cf. Osborne and Rubinstein 1994, Chap. 8).
- 10.
The conditions considered are essentially three: how risk-seeking is i, what the probability of a violation to be detected is, and how prone is j to react upon a detection.
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Grossi, D., Tummolini, L., Turrini, P. (2013). Norms in Game Theory. In: Ossowski, S. (eds) Agreement Technologies. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5583-3_12
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