Institutionalised Commitment and Its Origins

Schelling (1960) and Frank (1988) famously offered commitment as an explanation of the stability of human cooperation in the face of incentives to cheat. Reputationally-enforced commitments were part of the explanation for human cooperation for much of our history (Khan, 2024, 2025). In this article, I consider the origins and effects of institutionalised commitments. These are commitments which are contractually enforced by third parties, rather than only reputationally enforced. I discuss how these commitment offer advantages for securing cooperation over and above our previous forms of commitment. I then offer an account of their potential origins. I suggest that a change in our cooperative landscape and organisational structure occurring in the Neolithic -- in particular, the rise of agricultural economies and hierarchical society -- opened the door to a new means of enforcement for commitments, affecting the success of our cooperative practices.