Institutions Are Strict Extensions of the Game

In plain words

Play a game once and theory predicts the play. Play it many times and reputations, norms and conventions appear. What are they?

On a small, fully explicit repeated game the paper shows the institutional state is a strict extension. It makes predictions that the game's own vocabulary cannot express. The gap is priced exactly by a conditional mutual information.

A published human Prisoner's Dilemma dataset was reanalyzed under a protocol registered before any data access. The main prediction held out of sample. A more specific timing prediction failed, in the opposite direction: history dependence grows with experience.

What it shows

• Institutional state is the coarsest predictive summary of history.
• It is not definable from the stage game on the finite carrier.
• One preregistered hypothesis confirmed, one refuted, both reported.

What it does not claim

Claims are scoped to the declared carrier, protocols and dataset.

Cite

Tsiokos, I. (2026). Institutions Are Strict Extensions of the Game. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20713293