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Protocol Institutions

Michael Zargham and Ilan Ben-Meir 

Douglass C. North defined institutions as "humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic, and social interaction." According to the Internet Policy Review, “a protocol is a set of formal standards or agreements that control how data and objects behave in infrastructural networks.” While protocols and institutions emerged from different fields, they share a common subject – enabling constants which organize individual behavior so as to create reliable patterns in aggregate behavior. The institutional economics literature is unclear on whether institutions are the “rules, norms and shared strategies” which represent patterns in human behavior or the “enduring regularities” produced by conforming to them. Rather than focusing on analysis of institutions, we direct our attention to how protocols provide a means of formally relating local constraints to patterns in aggregate behavior by turning to the control systems engineering literature. While historically, the application of control systems engineering to institutions is the subject of cybernetics, advances in cooperative control emphasize coordination between autonomous actors within distributed systems rather than prescriptive command and control architectures. The controls engineering literature has advanced well beyond the cybernetics canon; therefore we focus on integrating the most recent work on generalized dynamical systems as a framework for institutional engineering. The controls engineering operationalizes models of real world systems and then implements state feedback control laws to drive those systems to reliably achieve desired outcomes. Our institutional engineering framework replaces the state dependent control laws with protocols which constrain, but do not dictate actions; nonetheless they reliably produce desired outcomes. Protocols are the state-dependent constraints on individual actions within a particular organization which ensure desired system-level properties within that same organization; institutions are the stable system-level properties of those organizations. This ontology unlocks various desirable characteristics of control systems, including but not limited to design and analysis of nested architectures. We explore our synthesis of control systems engineering and institutional economics by examining the institutions of diplomacy, science and engineering. Applying these definitions to the institutions of Science and Engineering reveals them to be, at their core, constituted by protocols. Science, as an institution, is defined in terms of the Scientific Method – which may be clearly understood as a protocol, insofar as it offers standards for collectively creating, sharing and iterating on knowledge (data). Engineering, as an institution, is defined in terms of the Engineering Design Process – which may be clearly understood as a protocol, insofar as it offers standards for collectively creating, sharing and iterating on technology (objects). Another historically salient institution is diplomacy – while at first glance diplomacy may seem out of place alongside science and engineering, Diplomatic Protocol is a set of rules, traditions, and customs that govern how diplomatic interactions should take place. The specific terms of treaties dictating how nations should act also bear the term “protocol”. In the context of international relations, protocols serve as the means of coordination across significant cultural differences. Likewise, science harmonizes knowledge production processes across vast differences in discipline, and engineering makes possible technology realization across vast differences in fieldsite. These protocols, therefore, share a function of enmeshing otherwise disparate activities without suppressing their variety; they offer a means to pairing authority to accountability in order to achieve reliability at scale without presuming a central authority. These protocols induce and stabilize system level patterns of behavior – institutions – within the organization that implement them. Looking forward toward institutional innovation, the development of peer-to-peer protocols and complementary practices may serve as a more durable form of prefiguration.