Motivation

Relatively short post this week as I look forward to discussing the paper in class. Table 1 seems like a real useful resource, bringing together many of the conceptual frames from the past semester into one place. From a modeling standpoint, establishing these distinct design levers will be very valuable in years to come, when cooperative models of human behavior can be used to predict (based on known data of human motivations) how a set of legal rules will play out.

Having this in mind, I think it may be helpful to somehow separate the “crowding out” lever out of the current list of 13 design levers. The article describes “design levers” as “elements of [a] system designed to, and capable of, affecting the dynamics of the social system to which they apply . . . . [T]hey increase the likelihood that participants will behave cooperatively . . . “. The way I understand how crowding out works, it seems to me less an independent lever, but more a theory describing how a set of two or more design levers interact so as to diminish the effects of some of the levers compared to the others. Looking at the set of 13 design levers, it seems that crowding out is the only one that cannot operate alone — crowding out cannot be an element of system design absent the presence of at least two other design levers (communication, empathy/humanization, solidarity, …). All the others, with perhaps only the exception of exit/entry, are able to stand alone.

I think a good comparison of where this field is heading is to look at the field of systems biology. I took a course on the subject in graduate school and it didn’t dawn on me until now that many of the same principles/buzzwords apply – cooperativity, repression (~crowding out theory), multistability, diffusion (Silicon Valley example), local effects vs. global effects (see group selection), etc. If you’re curious to learn more about this analogy, check out http://web.mit.edu/biophysics/sbio/ .