Law, Policy, and Cooperation

The last two decades have seen significant work undermining the selfishness hypothesis commonly used as a simplifying device for analysis based on the rational actor model. The work traverses a wide range of disciplines, from experimental economics and game theory, to anthropology, social psychology, and evolutionary biology. At the same time, organizational sociology and management science have been chronicling and systematizing observations about the development of collaborative models of production in some of the most innovative, competitive industries in the global economy, while work on the emergence of the networked economy has emphasized the increasing centrality of large scale collaborative models to information and cultural production. These diverse intellectual trends suggest a need to adapt legal and policy design to incorporate the greater diversity of human types and attitudes toward cooperation. The paper synthesizes out of the underlying literature a set of design elements, and suggests how they might be used to systematize our approaches to the design of policy interventions and institutions based on assumptions that differ quite fundamentally from the dominant assumptions of selfishness and solipsism, without requiring an assumption of universal altruism or necessitating a new communitarianism.