Notes on committing to things, and the implications of that for cooperation. Relevant to multi-agent causality where agents make decisions, in the context of iterated games in multi-agent systems with applications to AI safety and institution design.
This is a big area about which I as yet know little.
1 Intertemporal commitment
Making deals with your past/future self. For now see intertemporal decisions.
2 Commitment races
Commitment Races are important in international relations. They also seem popular in AI safety theory, although I’m not sure why since I don’t understand how AIs can credibly commit to things; setting up credible signals that they will commit seems difficult and probably exceptional for very opaque systems.
3 Contracts
TBC
4 Incoming
North and Weingast (1989):
The article studies the evolution of the constitutional arrangements in seventeenth-century England following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It focuses on the relationship between institutions and the behaviour of the government and interprets the institutional changes on the basis of the goals of the winners to secure property rights, protect their wealth, and eliminate confiscatory government. We argue that the new institutions allowed the government to commit credibly to upholding property rights. Their success was remarkable, as the evidence from capital markets shows.