Behavior in Silico: Essays on Emergent Coordination and Institutional Constraint

Abstract

This dissertation examines how coordination takes hold and how institutions shape outcomes in artificial and human economies. Chapter 1 reconstructs a classic common-pool and bargaining experiment with language-model agents and reproduces the central results of Ostrom, Walker, and Gardner (1992), providing a benchmark for cooperation, sanctions, specialization, and learning. Chapter 2 is organized as a robustness exercise: it varies coordination protocols, bargaining rules, property rights, governance mechanisms, model families, prompts, and parameters, and it tests performance under uncertainty and adversarial behavior. Chapter 3 applies border-discontinuity and structural methods to measure the institutional effects of local housing regulation and their macroeconomic consequences.