Competition and Selection Among Conventions

In many domains, a latent competition among different conventions determines which one will come to dominate. One sees such effects in the success of community jargon, of competing frames in political rhetoric, or of terminology in technical contexts. These effects have become widespread in the online domain, where the data offers the potential to study competition among conventions at a fine-grained level. In analyzing the dynamics of conventions over time, however, even with detailed on-line data, one encounters two significant challenges. First, as conventions evolve, the underlying substance of their meaning tends to change as well; and such substantive changes confound investigations of social effects. Second, the selection of a convention takes place through the complex interactions of individuals within a community, and contention between the users of competing conventions plays a key role in the convention's evolution. Any analysis must take place in the presence of these two issues. In this work we study a setting in which we can cleanly track the competition among conventions. Our analysis is based on the spread of low-level authoring conventions in the eprint arXiv over 24 years: by tracking the spread of macros and other author-defined conventions, we are able to study conventions that vary even as the underlying meaning remains constant. We find that the interaction among co-authors over time plays a crucial role in the selection of them; the distinction between more and less experienced members of the community, and the distinction between conventions with visible versus invisible effects, are both central to the underlying processes. Through our analysis we make predictions at the population level about the ultimate success of different synonymous conventions over time--and at the individual level about the outcome of "fights" between people over convention choices.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of WWW 2017, data at https://github.com/CornellNLP/Macro

Strategic Interaction and Conventions

The scope of the paper is to review the literature that employs coordination games to study social norms and conventions from the viewpoint of game theory and cognitive psychology. We claim that those two alternative approaches are complementary, as they provide different insights to explain how people converge to a unique system of self-fulfilling expectations in presence of multiple, equally viable, conventions. While game theory explains the emergence of conventions relying on efficiency and risk considerations, the psychological view is more concerned with frame and labeling effects. The interaction between these alternative (and, sometimes, competing) effects leads to the result that coordination failures may well occur and, even when coordination takes place, there is no guarantee that the convention eventually established will be the most efficient.Behavioral Game Theory, conventions, social norms

Competing Conventions with Costly Information Acquisition

We consider an evolutionary model of social coordination in a 2 × 2 game where two groups of players prefer to coordinate on different actions. Players can pay a cost to learn their opponent’s group: if they pay it, they can condition their actions concerning the groups. We assess the stability of outcomes in the long run using stochastic stability analysis. We find that three elements matter for the equilibrium selection: the group size, the strength of preferences, and the information’s cost. If the cost is too high, players never learn the group of their opponents in the long run. If one group is stronger in preferences for its favorite action than the other, or its size is sufficiently large compared to the other group, every player plays that group’s favorite action. If both groups are strong enough in preferences, or if none of the groups’ sizes is large enough, players play their favorite actions and miscoordinate in inter-group interactions. Lower levels of the cost favor coordination. Indeed, when the cost is low, in inside-group interactions, players always coordinate on their favorite action, while in inter-group interactions, they coordinate on the favorite action of the group that is stronger in preferences or large enough

Strategic Interaction and Conventions

The scope of the paper is the literature that employs coordination games to study social norms and conventions from the viewpoint of game theory and cognitive psychology. We claim that those two alternative approaches are complementary, as they provide different insights to explain how people converge to a unique system of self-fulfilling expectations in presence of multiple, equally viable, conventions. While game theory explains the emergence of conventions relying on efficiency and risk considerations, the psychological view is more concerned with frame and labeling effects. The interaction between these alternative (and, sometimes, competing) effects leads to the result that coordination failures may well occur and, even when coordination takes place, there is no guarantee that the convention eventually established will be the most efficient.conventions, social norms, behavioral game theory

Sharp transition towards shared vocabularies in multi-agent systems

What processes can explain how very large populations are able to converge on the use of a particular word or grammatical construction without global coordination? Answering this question helps to understand why new language constructs usually propagate along an S-shaped curve with a rather sudden transition towards global agreement. It also helps to analyze and design new technologies that support or orchestrate self-organizing communication systems, such as recent social tagging systems for the web. The article introduces and studies a microscopic model of communicating autonomous agents performing language games without any central control. We show that the system undergoes a disorder/order transition, going trough a sharp symmetry breaking process to reach a shared set of conventions. Before the transition, the system builds up non-trivial scale-invariant correlations, for instance in the distribution of competing synonyms, which display a Zipf-like law. These correlations make the system ready for the transition towards shared conventions, which, observed on the time-scale of collective behaviors, becomes sharper and sharper with system size. This surprising result not only explains why human language can scale up to very large populations but also suggests ways to optimize artificial semiotic dynamics.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Competing logics in evaluating employee performance: Building compromises through conventions

Recent interest in institutional complexity has raised the question how organizations manage rival institutional logics. In this paper we argue that organizations can embed compromises between institutional logics in conventions that impart information how organization members should align competing logics. Using the case of performance appraisal reform in a German public sector organization, we illustrate how a convention aligns accountability and professional logic and show how the compromise between these competing logics is established over time. By introducing the concept of convention, we provide an alternative to research that studies coexistence of logics in organizations as a result of organization members with different identities

Knowledge and Politics, and Law in Modern Society- By Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Professor Unger has given us two striking books, which present an ununusual problem for the reviewer. The great run of books, as the great run of thought, falls into established conventions. They are concerned with elucidating aspects of the convention of which they partake, or challenging competing conventions. Reviewer and reader will usually be aware of the general outlines of the convention, leaving the reviewer with the relatively simple tasks of placing the work within the appropriate convention, and making such critical remarks as appear warranted

Competing conventions: The Big Branders’ struggle to incorporate new quality conceptions in the Norwegian food market

The paper addresses recent changes in the Norwegian agrifood industry from the analytical perspective of quality conventions. Storper and Salais’ “worlds of production” plus Boltanski and Thévenots’ “orders of worth” are used as a basis for the empirical study. First, the paper discusses how the largest Norwegian branders try to strategically adapt to “novel” quality attributes like health-enhancing food, origin/terroir, environmental sustainability and ethics. Second, the paper investigates the companies’ quality signalling strategy: How are these “novel” qualities communicated to consumers? Multiple options are available: Do they attempt to systematically incorporate “novel qualities” into their private brand equity (“conventionalizing qualities”)? Do they prefer a co-labelling scheme with a third party control, or do they use any other measures for quality signalling? The paper thereby discusses how the largest Norwegian branders in the food sector cope with conflicting and competing quality conventions.Food quality, economics of convention., Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,