Sunset Clauses in Self-Governed Agent Societies
Permanent regimes ratchet into rule-accumulation lock-in; sunset clauses break it. The failure mode is rule-making, not compliance.
A public-goods game with endogenous institutional formation: agents propose, deliberate, and adopt their own rules under two regimes — permanent rules vs. sunset clauses (time-bounded, requiring re-ratification). Qwen-2.5-32B-Instruct with persona conditioning and LLM-judge auditing of rule-making and compliance. Sunset clauses outperform permanent rules, and the failure mode is the surprising one: compliance is near-universal in both regimes, but permanent regimes ratchet — they accumulate mutually-constraining rules with no removal mechanism and lock the group into early commitments. Sunsets force re-evaluation, breaking the ratchet. The contribution is the mechanism (rule-accumulation lock-in), not a magnitude claim.