RESOURCE IDENTITY AND INSTITUTIONAL COORDINATION: A FORMAL STUDY OF SELF-IDENTIFIED SCARCITY IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Abstract

Human societies, economic markets, and digital systems face a fundamental coordination prob- lem: how self-interested agents cooperate in the allocation and use of scarce resources. Across these domains, contention necessitates identity systems that inform coordination mechanisms and govern resource allocation. However, existing literature typically treats identity establishment and coordination as separate problems. Institutional economics often assumes resource identity as an exogenous feature of the environment, while distributed consensus algorithms focus on coordina- tion under the assumption that resource identity is already known and agreed upon. This separation limits our understanding of how identity architectures shape the cost, efficiency, and stability of cooperation. 1 Using game-theoretic modeling and agent-based simulations, this study employs an isomorphic framework linking distributed systems and social institutions to analyze resource contention and coordination. We deploy a Cryptographic Content-Addressed Version-Aware Distributed Mutual Exclusion architecture, supported by an open-source implementation, to model resource identity allocation among concurrent processes. Simulations involving up to 10,000 agents are executed on the developed computational platform to evaluate how decentralized resource identity formation influences coordination costs. By tracking these interactions, the model measures how the structural method used to establish resource identity affects the cost, efficiency, and stability of cooperation among anonymous self-interested agents. The simulations indicate that cryptographically derived resource identities can achieve Nash- Implementable incentive compatibility, enabling cooperative outcomes without requiring a coor- dinating authority beyond a ledger that functions as a passive institutional record whose state may be modified only through resource-specific operations. These computational findings demonstrate a broader coordination paradigm in which identity emerges endogenously from the originating environment or substrate in which the resource is created. When treated as an active institutional design choice, such identity architectures may reduce reliance on external consensus among intelli- gent agents by shifting coordination toward resource-centered state recognition maintained through a non-strategic ledger. This framework endows scarce resources in contention with intelligence through the electronic capability of endogenous, unique self-identification and ledger registration, enabling autonomous self-allocation to contending network agents—a mechanism that can transfer likely directly onto applications within the social sciences where allocation is consensus decided through an intelligent third party agent between independent contending agents. In attempt to provide resource itself the self-identification capability and participation in distribution to agents queueing for allocation, we see we are able to overcome computational cost in macro-structures. More generally, the results suggest that endogenous resource identity provides a framework for optimizing collective action and resolving contention across both digital platforms and broader social institutions. Keywords: resource identity, institutional coordination, cryptographic hashing, consensus protocols, game theory, agent-based modeling, mechanism design, distributed mutual exclusion, computational social science. 1 This paper is an independent writing sample submitted for graduate admission to the University of Chicago MACSS programme. It investigates the intersection of institutional economics, collective action theory, and distributed systems architecture. However, this research is not done for University of Chicago. The paper was not written specifically for this application; it reflects an independent research project undertaken in preparation for graduate study in computational social science. Research on isomorphic modelling for distibuted locking in computer networks: Cryptographic Content-Addressed Version-Aware Distributed Mutual Exclusion and corresponding codebase are available via GitHub (https://github.com/bpriyal/distcodelock/blob/main/README.md) and Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/ records/19634046).