تئوری بازی ها و موسسات

This short paper is a much abbreviated summary of an attempt to treat justice as a kind of institution, offered in the hope that it will serve as a case study in how game theory can serve as a useful intellectual framework for the study of human institutions.

The battle to persuade the economics profession that institutions matter was won many years ago. It is no longer necessary—if it ever was—to explain why perfectly competitive markets are not the answer to all economic problems. We can therefore get down to the problem of analyzing how institutions work, both those that already exist and those that exist only in the minds of theorists with utopian aspirations. The view I have tried to defend in this paper applies when one steps back from the detailed analysis of how particular institutions operate to examine why they evolved and how they survive. It conceptualizes an institution as a solution to an equilibrium selection problem in games that have many equilibria, thus potentially making the methodology of game theory available to institutional economists on a wider stage than has previously been common. Many problems in game theory remain unresolved. A particularly important unanswered question for institutional economics is the extent to which the folk theorem of repeated game theory survives when the strategic choices of the players are only imperfectly monitored by the other players. In such cases, there is much scope for cross-fertilization between institutional economics and game theory—just as I found scope for cross-fertilization between anthropology and game theory in trying to come up with a naturalistic explanation of the human sense of fair play. It is true that such a melding of the disciplines of institutional economics and game theory would require laying less stress on certain conventional ways of thinking that are usually thought to typify the New Institutional Economics, but most disciplines—including game theory—could benefit from a little creative destruction.