In Interaction-based economics, procedures specify how rule-governed exchanges among interdependent agents are instantiated, observed, and recorded so that strategic behavior constitutes repeatable and comparable evidence. Procedures operate at the level of structured interactions, ensuring that observed outcomes reflect defined rules and interdependence rather than isolated individual actions.
Reproducibility and Standardized Protocols
Interaction procedures require fully specified and standardized rules of engagement.
The interaction environment must be defined in advance, including participant roles, admissible actions, information structure, sequencing, timing, and enforcement conditions. A procedure is reproducible if an independent researcher can implement the same rules and generate structurally comparable interaction records under equivalent institutional settings.
Reproducibility in Interaction concerns replication of the interaction structure, not replication of particular strategic outcomes.
Calibration and Use of Standard References
Calibration in Interaction applies to shared transactional and strategic reference frames.
Procedures must fix units of account, pricing conventions, timing intervals, communication formats, and payoff references so that interaction records are interpreted consistently across implementations. Calibration ensures that observed variation reflects strategic behavior rather than differences in measurement conventions or institutional framing.
Calibration stabilizes how interaction outcomes map to defined relational quantities.
Control of Variables and Conditions
Interaction procedures must tightly control the strategic environment.
All influences external to the defined interaction—such as uncontrolled communication, extraneous coordination, ambiguous enforcement, or unintended rule modifications—must be eliminated or explicitly constrained. Procedures must specify exactly what information is available to each participant at each stage of the interaction.
Observed variation must arise solely from strategic interdependence under defined rules.
Repetition and Statistical Confidence
Interaction measurement relies on repeated execution of the same interaction structure.
Procedures must involve multiple realizations of identical rules across sessions, participant groups, or time periods to distinguish systematic strategic patterns from incidental outcomes. Statistical confidence is established through repeated exposure to the same institutional configuration.
Repetition stabilizes inference about interaction structure rather than averaging away strategic effects.
Systematic Data Collection and Processing
Interaction procedures require consistent recording of relational events.
Events such as bids, offers, trades, messages, allocations, and enforcement actions must be captured in a standardized, time-ordered format. Processing steps—including role attribution, sequencing, aggregation, and outcome construction—must be specified in advance and applied uniformly.
Procedural consistency ensures comparability across interaction settings and studies.
Documentation and Transparency of Methods
All Interaction procedures must be fully documented.
Documentation must specify rule definitions, role assignments, timing conventions, information conditions, enforcement mechanisms, and data processing steps. Procedures must be described in sufficient detail to allow independent reconstruction of the interaction environment and its resulting records.
An interaction procedure that cannot be reproduced from documentation does not generate admissible evidence.