Experimenting with governance in virtual worlds

Studying how institutional design shapes coordination, efficiency, and fairness in collective systems.

This project studies how governance structures shape collective behavior, efficiency, and fairness. Using large-scale online experiments, we build interactive virtual environments in which participants coordinate, compete, and cooperate under different institutional rules. These controlled societies allow us to systematically test how alternative governance systems influence learning, coordination, and collective outcomes.

Our goal is to develop a computational science of governance: identifying the principles by which rules, incentives, and power distributions shape social organization and performance. By embedding participants in dynamic, evolving environments, we observe how norms, institutions, and power structures emerge, stabilize, and adapt over time.

Virtual worlds and governance environments

What we do

  • Design large-scale virtual societies in which participants interact under controlled institutional constraints.
  • Systematically manipulate rules, incentives, and power structures to study their effects on cooperation, efficiency, inequality, and stability.
  • Analyze the emergence of social norms, collective strategies, and institutional equilibria.
  • Use computational modeling to formalize governance dynamics and predict collective outcomes.
  • Explore applications to online platforms, decentralized governance, and collective intelligence systems.
Institutional dynamics and collective adaptation

Why it matters

Governance systems shape the performance and fairness of virtually all collective organizations—from online platforms and scientific communities to firms, markets, and political institutions. As societies increasingly rely on digital infrastructure and algorithmic mediation, understanding how institutional rules shape collective intelligence becomes critical. This project provides experimental and computational tools for designing robust, adaptive, and fair governance systems, informing the development of digital democracies, cooperative platforms, and human–AI hybrid societies.

Emergence of norms and institutional equilibria
  • placeholder: governance in virtual worlds paper
  • placeholder: experimental platform
  • placeholder: computational modeling code and datasets