From Conditional Commitments to Generalized Media: On Means of Coordination Between Self-Governed Entities

In the absence of pre-established coordination structures, what can a self-governed entity – i.e. an entity that chooses on its own between its possible actions and cannot be controlled externally – do to evoke another self-governed entity’s cooperation? In this paper, the motivating conditional self-commitment is conceived to be the basic mechanism to solve coordination problems of this kind. It will be argued that such commitments have an inherent tendency to become more and more generalized and institutionalised. The sociological concept of generalized symbolic media is reinterpreted as a concept that focuses on this point. The conceptual framework resulting from the considerations is applicable to coordination problems between human actors as well as to coordination problems between artificial agents in open multi-agent systems. Thus, it may help to transfer solutions from one realm to the other.