A new approach to procedural freedom in game forms

This paper presents a new framework for ranking procedures in terms of freedom of choice. The concept of game forms is used to model procedures as a structure of individuals' interactions. Sets of outcomes for an individual are represented by the individual's own perceptions of the social states that are generated by the interaction of all individuals. I condense the information given by a game form and by the perceptions of outcomes to two sets for each individual, first the set of perceived outcomes the individual can actively determine and secondly the set of perceived outcomes the individual can actively exclude from happening. Techniques that are known from the literature on ranking opportunity sets in terms of freedom of choice are applied to the pairs of determination and exclusion sets. I propose different rankings of game forms in terms of procedural freedom, some of which I characterize axiomatically. The model and the rankings are illustrated by classical examples from Game Theory and Social Choice Theory.