Eroding the Alternative Substrate Games, Covert Foreclosure, and Capability Preservation
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: A substrate game is a dynamic game in which current play changes the future feasible-deviation set by maintaining or eroding a reconstructable capability base: practitioners, maintainers, corpora, artifacts, routines, institutions, and comparative standards. The primitive is an observable process of feasible menus and continuation responses, not a hidden taste or payoff state. Histories reduce by continuation-menu equivalence to a minimal future-menu quotient, which takes a row-normalized threshold form (unique up to increasing transformations) only when active response rows have finite complexity, compact no-reversal orders, and explicit real order embeddings; restoration prices, finite certification grammars, and diagnostics supply those routes, while stochastic quotients additionally require controlled lumpability. A separation result places the class properly inside stochastic games with state-dependent action sets. Feasibility of the dependent action is the sign of a margin G = E - M, and collapse is the event that this margin turns negative, not a period in which few agents choose the action. The monitoring results separate level, covariance, and secure-audit information: a level dashboard can be locally blind while the covariance channel still warns, a public dashboard can be made Blackwell-null between benchmark and eroding regimes exactly when common admissible mean and covariance envelopes exist, and a secure raw audit restores identification along mean, covariance, or cross-covariance directions. Incentive analysis shows that preserving the substrate requires a strictly positive subsidy deficit when too few agents privately prefer the dependent action, a stationary mixed Markov equilibrium exists for regular finite-state discounted games, and a crossed demand-availability design rejects a pure demand-only fixed-feasible null (under stated exclusion and separability assumptions) without uniquely identifying substrate repair among all supply-side mechanisms. The organizing contribution is the future-feasible-menu object and the joint treatment of representation, monitoring, erosion, repair, and empirical discrimination around it.
Author: Fathi, Kevin
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7162195269
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