“One of the big lessons of market design is that participants have big strategy sets, so that many kinds of rules can be bent without being broken. That is, there are lots of unanticipated behaviors that may be undesirable, but it’s hard to write rules that cover all of them. (It’s not only contracts that are incomplete...) ”—Al Roth
I think this summarizes my concerns with some of the recent discussions of rules and norm enforcement. People are complicated and the decision space is much larger than usually envisioned when talking about any specific rule, or with rules in general. Almost all interactions have some amount of adversarial (or at least not-fully-aligned) beliefs or goals, which is why we need the rules in the first place.
“One of the big lessons of market design is that participants have big strategy sets, so that many kinds of rules can be bent without being broken. That is, there are lots of unanticipated behaviors that may be undesirable, but it’s hard to write rules that cover all of them. (It’s not only contracts that are incomplete...) ”—Al Roth
I think this summarizes my concerns with some of the recent discussions of rules and norm enforcement. People are complicated and the decision space is much larger than usually envisioned when talking about any specific rule, or with rules in general. Almost all interactions have some amount of adversarial (or at least not-fully-aligned) beliefs or goals, which is why we need the rules in the first place.