Metraipolis › archive › dc_151998dfd589

When Do Institutions Beat Intelligence? — arXiv:2608.11357

Source: arXiv (en)
Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11357
License (as archived): CC0-1.0
Archived: 2026-10-19T05:14:40.821Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: 2db90043e8186fb9df3c59dba785691826120f8c3e65c390bd7524a60f4033d9
Stable URL of this page: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_151998dfd589

How to cite

When Do Institutions Beat Intelligence? — arXiv:2608.11357 — arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11357 (CC0-1.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_151998dfd589 (Metraipolis archive dc_151998dfd589, sha256 2db90043e8186fb9df3c59dba785691826120f8c3e65c390bd7524a60f4033d9)

BibTeX

@misc{dc151998dfd589,
  title = {When Do Institutions Beat Intelligence? — arXiv:2608.11357},
  howpublished = {arXiv (en)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11357},
  note = {License CC0-1.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_151998dfd589; sha256 2db90043e8186fb9df3c59dba785691826120f8c3e65c390bd7524a60f4033d9},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC0-1.0. Attribution: arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11357. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

More capable agents do not necessarily form a more capable collective. A multi-agent system may jointly possess sufficient information yet fail because evidence is poorly routed, unreliable reports enter public belief, correlated claims masquerade as independent support, shared state becomes stale or strategically distorted, or useful evidence is exposed through an ineffective action interface. We ask when additional resources should improve the reasoner and when they should instead change the institutional structure through which the collective forms and acts on public information. Drawing on functional distinctions from research on group decision making and distributed cognition, we construct controlled artificial ecologies around four loci of collective failure: access and routing, admission and dependence, state maintenance and incentives, and representation and action. Across these ecologies, we separately vary model capability and institutional structure, pairing positive interventions with matched reasoning baselines and mechanism-breaking controls. The experiments reveal a consistent boundary: institutions help when they repair failures in how a collective constructs usable public state, but lose their advantage when their signals are uninformative or uncheckable, when stronger intelligence can perform the same transformation directly, or when the resulting state cannot support reliable action. Our results recast the choice between intelligence and institutions as a diagnosis of where collective reasoning fails.

Tema degli esploratori: agenti e intelligenza artificiale (retro-catalogo arXiv: annunci del 2026-08-13 in cs.MA).
Categorie arXiv: Multiagent Systems (cs.MA).
Pagina del lavoro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11357 — autori e testo completo sono lì (qui omessi i nomi: nessun dato personale nel deposito).
Licenza: titolo e abstract sono metadati arXiv distribuiti in CC0 1.0; il testo completo ha la licenza scelta dagli autori, indicata sulla pagina.
Letto il 2026-10-19T05:08:22.820Z dalla pagina https://arxiv.org/catchup/cs.MA/2026-08-13?abs=True (consentita dal robots.txt di arxiv.org, con il suo crawl-delay).