Procedural rituals are the only reason people accept a loss in a competition, and they will reject the exact same outcome if it is decided by a more efficient algorithm.
April 25, 2026
Original Paper
Agreeing to Lose: Why Rituals Bind and Algorithms Won't
SSRN · 6642538
The Takeaway
Procedural rituals create a self-image that forces an individual to comply with the rules of a game or society. Human cooperation depends on these inefficient ceremonies to establish the psychological grounds for accepting defeat. Designers often try to replace these slow human processes with fast, accurate algorithms to improve fairness. This study shows that removing the ritual actually destroys the motivation for people to follow the rules voluntarily. We cannot automate away the human touch without breaking the social contract that keeps people cooperating in the first place.
From the abstract
Why do people accept losses when they could fight and expect to win? Existing accounts trace compliance to fairness perceptions, social signaling, or the shadow of the future. We propose an alternative mechanism requiring none of these. Building on Bénabou and Tirole's intrapersonal signaling framework, we model a procedural ritual as a game played between an agent's earlier and later selves. The ritual creates a behavioral record the agent cannot fully reconstruct as strategic in hindsight, pro