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
