Strategic uncertainty, coordination failure and emergence

A game theory study on agency‐structure interactions

Bibliographic Data

ID8975432
AuthorsYi Yang (0000-0002-9729-8522, School of Government Peking University China, corresponding author), Lin Liu (0000-0002-7202-3418, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume49
Issue4
Pages402-420
Publication date2019-05-23
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8308 • E-ISSN: 1468-5914
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/jtsb.12215
OpenAlexW2946536585
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited49

In the social sciences there is a long standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behavior. Structurationists like Giddens think of individuals' agency and collective features as two sides of the same coin while emergentists including Archer and Elder‐Vass claim that structurationists are blurring an important ontological distinction——they argue for effective social analysis, we should think of structures and individuals as different things because emergence happens when the properties of the collective are not reducible to the properties of the parts that constitute them. This paper contributes to the agency‐structure debate by showing how production and reproduction of emergent properties of social groups sharing same normative commitments (norm circles) can be empirically studied using two behavioral game theory experiments, adding a previously neglected insight that strategic uncertainty can lead to coordination failures of individual behaviors within norm circles, manifested as unintended outcomes of interdependent actions that are difficult to predict. Here the synchronic relation between the unpredictable collective outcomes of each game round and agential reactions of the participants to them defines emergence——the previous outcomes are diachronic inputs but they appear in the new outcome only through their effects on the individual decisions

Agency (philosophy · Collective behavior · Coordination game · Economics · Epistemology · Interdependence · Microeconomics · Norm (philosophy · Normative · Outcome (game theory · Political science · Positive economics · Reproduction · Social science · Social structure · Sociology · Structure and agency · Unintended consequences · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Critical Realism in Sociology · Law · Management and Organizational Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology

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