Yet what enables conventions to be metastable assurance mechanisms? This question requires us to consider what is required of an assurance device.true religion womens bootcut jeansLewis suggests: “[c]oordination may be rationally achieved with the aid of a system of concordant mutual expectations, of first or higher orders, about the agents actions, preferences, and rationality” (#( Lewis 1969: location 302 )#). Yet how can Betty know what others expect of each other, as they reflect on each other’s expectations “at higher orders?” Such concordant expectations would appear to invite an interminable regress of second-guessing among anonymous partners who inhabit large and anonymous groups.
Notably, such a regress may be avoided wherever partners discover “focal points,” Schelling’s term for features of a situation that dictate “each person’s expectation of what the other expects him to expect to be expected to do” (#( Schelling 1960: 57 )#). Focal points offer something like a publically consultable record that instructs partners about what each should do, much like a telephone book tells Betty, Svensson, and other strangers their telephone numbers. While one can always pretend to be a skeptic about what others know, cooperation’s problem is not that of refuting skepticism but rather of obtaining sufficient motivation for sufficiently many partners to afford cooperation’s rewards in Rousseau’s forest and Hume’s meadow. The analysis of conventions as sufficiently clear public instructions, sustained from mutually satisfying benefits, appears plausible and has many supporters (#( Bacharach 2006; Sugden 2003 )#)].
Simply explaining puzzling findings post hoc, as “they must somehow share some norms,” is not a satisfactory strategy in the long run [and does not] explain fully how individuals do overcome social dilemmas… [We] need to dig into the analysis of institutions so that we can understand how individuals adopt norms as well as rules to overcome social dilemmas (#( Ostrom 2005: location 2676 )#).
Why do cooperative instructions cause cooperation? Recall that we are interested in solutions to cooperation problems at coordination’s fragile limits, where the differences between cooperation’s dependent benefits and defection’s independent benefits may be small; where the opportunity costs from cooperative decisions may be great; or where successful exchange requires the cooperative actions of potentially many anonymous partners. While solutions to such problems might appear trivial, the instability of efficient exchange at the risky end of coordination’s spectrum arises from the simplest cases.
To see this, consider how coordination may fail partners who are able to communicate before they interact. At first blush, language would appear to be an especially powerful assurance mechanism because it allows partners to name the efficient equilibrium as their focal point: “Tomorrow at 7 am, we drain the meadow. Those who do not turn up will be beaten severely.” Indeed, the results of experimental games show that coordination dilemmas are reliably assured from pre-game communication even without such draconian threats. While subjects who cannot communicate always learn the risk dominate equilibrium, those who can communicate always learn the Pareto efficient equilibrium (#( Kim and Sobel 1995 )#), even in situations where cooperation may be threatened by theft (#( Silk et al. 2000 )#).
Does pre-game communication assure efficient exchange because language affords exquisitely precise and clear instructions? It is difficult to know whether experimental subjects who exchange comments before laboratory games have not already cultivated cooperative habits from systems whose complexity far exceeds the instructional capacity of language. We should not conclude from such experiments that it is the propositional content of pre-game locutions that is doing the motivational work. Similarly we should not infer from such experiments that instructions assure real world coordination dilemmas.true religion womens carrie premium vintage missouri Indeed, we have independent reason to doubt the plausibility of such an inference.