Modeling a Coordination Regime

Peter Vanderschraaf (University of California, Merced)

Peter Vanderschraaf, University of California, Merced

Modeling a Coordination Regime

Hume famously denies that the relationship between the rulers and the ruled of a state is contractual and argues that instead this relationship is founded upon convention. Several authors, including Brian Skyrms, have revived this idea in contemporary political philosophy. If the rulers and the ruled can be in such a coordination regime, this would account for why the ruled in many actual states should obey their governments and why their governments should provide adequate services without appeal to dubious free-standing political obligations. But I argue that a coordination regime falls outside the scope of the standard game-theoretic accounts of convention proposed by David Lewis and Robert Sugden. I propose a model of a coordination regime that integrates elements of the theory of repeated games with the economics of search. In this model, if the incumbent sovereign fails to serve the ruled adequately, the ruled can depose this sovereign and return to the State of Nature. But they then must search for a new sovereign they expect will serve them adequately. I explore conditions that characterize a coordination regime that are analogous to folk-theorem equilibria of long- and short-lived players in repeated games.