| This dissertation examines the emergence of social institutions as an indirect effect of uncoordinated individual decision making. It is argued that under certain circumstances learning and mutual adjustment among imperfect agents suffice to provide institutions with stability, efficiency, and autonomy, even when interaction among agents is short-term. How, or to what degree, formal institutions like government influence the evolution of informal institutions is an open question. Hayek, for example, seems to argue that, despite the importance of formal institutions of political decision making, evolutionary pressures accomplish most of the work of "designing" institutions.; The analytical part of the dissertation uses a genetic algorithm based computer simulation to determine the extent to which only locally informed independent agents may be expected to evolve behavioral rules or strategies for effectively playing social games. Two basic environments are examined. The first is a "state of nature" where institutions emerge only as a response to the relative performance in the social games of interest. The second is a setting where government or some other organization attempts to modify or coordinate the behavior of individuals by punishing and rewarding their behavior.; The simulation results suggest autonomous agents can coordinate their behavior even in an environment dominated by short-term considerations. The addition of a weak state to the model weakly improves the stability, efficiency, and autonomy of informal institutions. This means that the true role of government lies in games of the strict prisoner's dilemma category rather than those categorized as coordination type problems.; The dissertation will be of interest to those concerned with the Austrians' ideas about spontaneous order, new institutionalist models of institutions, models of the emergence of cooperation, or public choice models of state-society interaction. |
