Institutions as Cognitive Media between Strategic Interactions and Individual Beliefs

Based on fundamental studies of knowledge theory and epistemic game theory, this paper discusses the role of institutions in substantive forms as societal artifacts that cognitively mediates the strategic interactions and individual beliefs in the societal games. This approach is termed as the institutions-as-cognitive-media-view and its implications to the role of culture, institutional complementarities, habits and emotion, social norms, policy, and so on in institutional evolution are discussed in epistemic-game theoretic framework. In sum, it proposes a three level approach to institutions: generic-ontological, comparative-substantive and policy-design levels