Diagnosing Institutional Non-Formation in Universal BIOS v0.1 Unanimity, Founder Choice, and the Limits of Archived Evidence
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Institutional non-formation may arise because no mutually acceptable agreement exists within a given choice set, or because an acceptable agreement exists but is not selected by the founder. This diagnostic preprint examines that distinction in Universal BIOS v0.1, an agent-based model of collective resource management and voluntary institutional formation. The preserved archival evidence comprises 24 unique scenario–seed units containing 576 institutional foundation offers, none of which were accepted. A broader historical execution inventory includes 47 completed runs and 1,128 offers, incorporating 23 matched-seed technical repeats. Available state snapshots cover 17 of the 24 unique units and 340 of 480 possible unit-turns. The paper reconstructs the model's formation rules, liquidity requirements, individual utility calculations, and strict unanimity condition. It introduces a state-dependent diagnostic measure, M(S;x), to distinguish the absence of any unanimously acceptable charter from a founder's failure to select an acceptable alternative among 36 available configurations. This diagnostic has not yet been computed for the historical offers. The archived records do not preserve the complete pre-decision states and alternative-charter utility evaluations necessary to establish the causes of rejection. No new model simulations, counterfactual evaluations, or independent empirical replications were conducted. The contribution is an evidence-bounded diagnostic framework, supported by an archival atlas, mathematical analysis, and explicitly identified research limitations. The study does not claim to explain the observed institutional failures causally or to validate the model against real-world human institutional behavior. The research was led by İrfan Boko with disclosed analytical and writing assistance from Academia Co-Scientist and OpenAI ChatGPT.
Author: Irfan Boko
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225566648