I think John Wentworth and I are modelling it in different ways and that may be the root of your confusion. To me, dominance is something like the credible ability and willingness to impose costs targeted at particular agents, whereas John Wentworth is more using the submission signalling definition.
Your definition seems like it fits the Emperor of China example—by reputation, they had few competitors for being the most willing and able to pessimize another agent’s utility function; e.g. 9 Familial Exterminations. And that seems to be a key to understanding this type of power, because if they were able to pessimize all other agents’ utility functions, that would just be an evil mirror of bargaining power. Being able to choose a sharply limited number of unfortunate agents, and punish them severely pour encourager les autres, seems like it might just stop working when the average agent is smart enough to implicitly coordinate around a shared understanding of payoff matrices. So I think I might have arrived back to the “all dominance hierarchies will be populated solely by scheming viziers” conclusion.
I think John Wentworth and I are modelling it in different ways and that may be the root of your confusion. To me, dominance is something like the credible ability and willingness to impose costs targeted at particular agents, whereas John Wentworth is more using the submission signalling definition.
Your definition seems like it fits the Emperor of China example—by reputation, they had few competitors for being the most willing and able to pessimize another agent’s utility function; e.g. 9 Familial Exterminations.
And that seems to be a key to understanding this type of power, because if they were able to pessimize all other agents’ utility functions, that would just be an evil mirror of bargaining power. Being able to choose a sharply limited number of unfortunate agents, and punish them severely pour encourager les autres, seems like it might just stop working when the average agent is smart enough to implicitly coordinate around a shared understanding of payoff matrices.
So I think I might have arrived back to the “all dominance hierarchies will be populated solely by scheming viziers” conclusion.
Can you explain what this coordination would look like?