Commitment, contracts, cooperation

2025-05-13 — 2025-05-13

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Figure 1: And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer, put fire in it, added incense, and offered strange fire before the Lord, which He had not commanded them. Then fire went out from the Lord and devoured them, and they died before the Lord. Lev 10:1-2

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

  • Comparative advantage and when to blow up your island

  • North and Weingast ():

    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.

5 References

Dütting, Feldman, and Talgam-Cohen. 2024. Algorithmic Contract Theory: A Survey.” Foundations and Trends® in Theoretical Computer Science.
Hadfield-Menell, and Hadfield. 2018. Incomplete Contracting and AI Alignment.”
Neyman, and Roughgarden. 2022. Strictly Proper Contract Functions Can Be Arbitrage-Free.” Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
———. 2023. From Proper Scoring Rules to Max-Min Optimal Forecast Aggregation.” Operations Research.
North, and Weingast. 1989. Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England.” The Journal of Economic History.
Pincus, and Robinson. 2011. What Really Happened During the Glorious Revolution? Working Paper. Working Paper Series.
Rajan, and Zingales. 1998. Power in a Theory of the Firm.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Saavedra, Reed-Tsochas, and Uzzi. 2009. A Simple Model of Bipartite Cooperation for Ecological and Organizational Networks.” Nature.
Skyrms. 2004. The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure.
Weber. 1994. Games in Coalitional Form.” In Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications.