institutions.md

Institutions

The layer around the resource is the same in every module, and each variant switches it.

• Public ledger (ledger_public) — every cog's alias, cumulative extraction, cumulative maintenance effort, its last five compact actions and its sanction counters. With the ledger off, only the aggregate taken last round survives: the no-reputation control.
• Costly sanctions (sanctions_enabled) — one target per cog per round. The payer loses 1.0 and the target loses 3.0. Welfare-negative on purpose.
• Posted norm (norm_text) — one line in every observation and in every LLM system prompt. It binds nothing; it is a focal point.
• Chat (chat_enabled) — one signed public line per cog per round, at most 140 runes, visible in the NEXT round's observation and never inside its own.

Cogs address each other by anonymous alias (Cog-A … Cog-F), assigned by a seeded permutation. Real policy names exist spectator-side only: in the replay, the results and the viewer. A cog can never read who it is playing against.

Hidden from every cog: another cog's secret favourite colour, another cog's private note, any decision for the current round, the episode seed, and the grader's optimum.