Frank Hindriks, Francesco Guala (2015), Journal of Institutional Economics 11(3):459–480; first published online 16 October 2014. Reply to commentators: JIE 11(3):515–522, DOI 10.1017/S1744137415000120 — DOI-10.1017/S1744137414000496
Key takeaways
- An institution is a rule in equilibrium. Rules alone cannot say why some rules are followed and others are not (the 65 mph limit that everyone treats as 75). Equilibria alone let in too much: the butterfly Pararge aegeria plays a correlated equilibrium over sunspots but has no institution. Institutions are correlated equilibria of coordination games with several equilibria, represented by the players as rules.
- Constitutive rules are regulative rules with a name. A regulative rule [R] (“if one occupies land first, one has the right to its exclusive use”) is split by a new term into a base rule [B] (“first occupant’s land is her property*”) and a status rule [S] (“property* gives the right to exclusive use”). [B] and [S] together have Searle’s “X counts as Y in C” form, unpacked as “if C then X is Y, and if Y then Z”. Because the new term is conservative and eliminable in Belnap’s sense, nothing is added but cognitive economy and a name.
- Consequences drawn. Multiple realisability of institutional kinds (shells or coins as money) corresponds to multiple equilibria. Searle’s view would wrongly deny that etiquette or driving on the right are institutions. By Lewis’s account of theoretical terms, “property” refers if the rules that introduce it are true.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, as part of filling out the
record’s coverage of social-ontology (ADR-017), which names rules in
equilibrium as one of the literatures THEORY-043’s anti-nesting question
can draw on. It is the record’s main text for how the economists’
equilibrium account and the philosophers’ constitutive-rule account fit
together. NOTE-395 is the reading.
How it relates Searle to Lewis. Lewis’s conventions (LIT-473) are its starting point: “the first major breakthrough in the equilibria approach” (§3). It generalises Lewis’s symmetric coordination equilibria to correlated equilibria, where a signal such as first occupancy tells each player what to do. It adds a representation condition, that the players encode their strategies as rules. Searle’s constitutive rules then appear as a way of naming such an equilibrium, not as a different kind of rule. The authors say Lewis “would agree that accepting regulative rules (strategies) suffices for their existence” (§6). That is their reading of Lewis, not a quotation of him. The Searle being answered here is the Searle of The Construction of Social Reality (LIT-485), filed alongside this paper with Searle’s 2006 article “Social ontology: Some basic principles” (LIT-482). That is a different subject from Searle on the Chinese Room (LIT-400), and nothing here bears on that paper.
North (LIT-489). Section 2 opens with North’s definition of institutions as “the rules of the game”, quoted from his 1990 book, which is not in the record. The 1991 essay filed here gives the same definition. This paper’s objection to the rules account, that it cannot separate effective from nominal rules, is an objection North’s essay leaves open: North treats compliance as a matter of enforcement cost, and his essay ends by listing how informal constraints work as an open question.
Guala’s book (LIT-472) is the book-length version. Its chapter 1, the publisher’s sample, repeats this paper’s §2 examples (the French trousers law, the speed limit, marriage) in the same order.
Epstein (LIT-478, LIT-487). Epstein’s frame principles generalise Searle’s constitutive rules, and his anchors generalise collective acceptance. This paper keeps the “counts as” form and makes acceptance whatever attitudes an equilibrium needs. The two projects agree that Searle’s single form is too narrow and disagree about what replaces it: for this paper an equilibrium, for Epstein a separate metaphysical relation of anchoring. The SEP entry places Guala and Hindriks 2020 in the new-institutional-economics tradition (§5.3).
Group minds. The paper says nothing about group agency or group minds. Its neutrality on collective intentionality (n. 14) is deliberate. For THEORY-043 its bearing is indirect: institutional facts, on this view, are patterns of individual strategies that people represent and name. Nothing in that requires, or rules out, a group-level subject.
No instruction for machine-learning practice appears, so nothing here points to the Anthology of the SOTA.