Social instruments for convention emergence

In this paper we present the notion of Social Instruments as a set of mechanisms that facilitate the emergence of norms from repeated interactions between members of a society. Specifically, we focus on two social instruments: rewiring and observation. Our main goal is to provide agents with tools that allow them to leverage their social network of interactions when effectively addressing coordination and learning problems, paying special attention to dissolving metastable subconventions. Finally, we present a more sophisticated social instrument (observation + rewiring) for robust resolution of subconventions, which works dissolving SelfReinforcing Substructures (SRS) in the social network.