11 and do what they did earlier, they would surely get the same payoffs as before. If each person chooses the same action as he or she would have chosen in the absence of the law, clearly each person must get the same payoff as what he or she would have got in the absence of the law, since the fact of some jottings on paper does not affect our payoffs. Hence, given the way we usually think of the strategies open to individuals and payoffs they earn, in brief, the game that people play, a new law cannot change these and so cannot change the game that people play.

To see this more clearly, return to the model in the previous section. Why, in the first place, did we think that the game was altered by the new law? Presumably because, after the new law, the same act of mining which earlier earned a payoff of B, now earns a payoff of B – pF. So at first sight, it does appear that the payoff function of the entrepreneur is changed. But clearly the payoff changes, if it does, because the police person tries to catch him and, if she succeeds, the entrepreneur is fined F dollars. However, the police person could have done the same thing even in the absence of the law. If everybody behaved the same way after the law was enacted as they did before the law was enacted, everybody would get the same payoff. Hence, the law or the fact that some ink has been smeared on paper or digital jottings made on a computer cannot make a difference to the game that people are playing. The same n-tuple of actions undertaken by the same n-tuple of players lead to the same payoffs for all the n players. The law cannot change this.

Likewise for a speeding law. Suppose a nation imposes a new speeding law whereby you are not supposed to drive above 100 km per hour and, if caught doing so, you are fined a certain amount. At first sight this seems to change the game people are playing. Earlier when you decided to drive above 100 km per hour you calculated the returns in terms of the time saved, the risk of a skid and so on. Now on top of all those, it seems, you have to add the expected cost of a fine. But this implicitly assumes that the traffic police is a robotic creature who will impose a fine because the law says so.

The mistake in the traditional view arises because of the unwitting assumption that leaves the enforcers of the law out of the picture or treats them as robots who will automatically do what the law asks them to do. If all the players in this game--the driver, the traffic police, the magistrate in the local court--are included in the game as players, as indeed they should be, it is clear that the law cannot change the game. If everybody behaved the way they did before the law, then everybody would get the same payoffs after the law as they did before the law since the mere writing down of the law cannot change the payoffs<sup>16</sup> . This is the flaw in the traditional

> about problems settled in the council on the advice of the magnate and with supporting authority of the prince— for this also is a law that ‘what pleases the prince has the force of law.’ (Hall, 2002, p. 2).

> 16 There can be no doubt that some of this will change as we move into a more digital age. We can use computers, and robots to monitor and implement some of the laws, and it may be possible to switch these machines into a special mode to carry out their altered role mechanically, at the moment of adopting a new law (World Bank,