Institutional Gaming

This paper proposes a model of 'institutional gaming,' in which intentional agents pursue their projects through games of a looser and deeper sort. Over many interactions, they develop formal institutions and informal norms concerning appropriate ways of maneuvering within them and expanding upon them. Agents shift among several different institutions governed by different norms addressing each of their many different concerns. No one agent is decisive, either negatively or positively, for long. Such a model of intentional goal-seeking agents, operating through and on history, and developing shared norms as an aid to doing so, makes tolerably good sense of much that modern institutionalists want to tell us.