Home ⟩ Workshops ⟩ Mathematics for Governance Design
Mathematics for Governance Design
October 7-11, 2024
International Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Bayes Centre, Edinburgh, Scotland
Speaker(s):
Jules Hedges, University of Strathclyde; Saba Siddiki, Syracuse University; Joshua Tan, Oxford University; Philipp Zahn, 20squares; Seth Frey, University of California Davis
Abstract:
Every major global challenge facing humanity can be understood as a governance challenge. However, governance institution design has been held back by the difficulty of formally representing complex institutions. Game theory is one very powerful formalism that for nearly 80 years has permitted the formal analysis of institutions. However, established conceptions of the role of game theory in social science fall short of its potential, trading realistic description for simple, tractable toy models. Mathematical representations of complex institutions will enable us to move beyond the limits of tools such as game theory by introducing the composability, abstraction, and modularity of software engineering. With formal representations, scholars can begin to imagine a computationally aided design (CAD) of arbitrarily complex institutions. For example, within recent frameworks like "categorical game theory," a focus of this workshop, researchers from across the social sciences can compose systems of economic games into complex governance institutions. With such advances, computationally inclined economists, sociologists, political scientists, and natural resource scholars gain a common language for representing fundamental challenges in the design of social systems. This interdisciplinary workshop accomplished the following objectives by bringing together mathematicians interested in serving social science and social scientists interested in the potential of formal models of institutions:
Expose computational social scientists to recent advances in the mathematical representation of social institutions
Expose mathematicians and computer scientists to methodology and pertinent challenges of social science, especially for areas such as natural resource management, climate governance, organizations, and democracy
Encourage collaborations between mathematicians and social scholars
Develop applications for compositional game theory in social science
Produce a roadmap for the development of compositional game theory tooling
The workshop had approximately 30 participants and introduced several disciplines of social science to category theory, the branch of mathematics interested in abstraction and representation, which makes it powerful for representing complex things like real world social systems. An exciting outcome of the workshop was that it pointed out ways that the Institutional Grammar can be made more powerful by integrating it into the power of game theory.
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