Many pressing social problems require coordinated changes across multiple interconnected domains. Climate action, for instance, requires simultaneous transitions in energy, transportation, agriculture, and consumer behaviour, where success in each domain depends on progress in others. In their joint work, Chad Lee-Stronach and Rory Smead ask: under what conditions can socially optimal coordination across domains emerge and persist? and formalise this challenge as the "problem of interdependent conventions'' using evolutionary game theory. 

Their analysis reveals a deeper challenge than previously recognised: interdependence creates qualitatively different coordination challenges than independent domains. Rather than converging to optimal or suboptimal outcomes, interdependent systems can become trapped in stable partial coordination—some domains succeed while others remain permanently stuck—or fail to coordinate at all. Their study shows that conditional cooperation mechanisms (contingent agreements, signalling platforms, and staged protocols) can work under special conditions. But three structural problems prevent their general implementation: 

1. Heterogeneity Trap: domains starting below critical cooperation thresholds remain trapped while others succeed;
2. Bootstrap Paradox: implementing the coordination mechanism requires the very coordination capacity it is meant to create; and
3. Temporal Gap: threshold-crossing requires substantially stronger interdependence than static analysis predicts, as committed actors erode before coordination emerges. 

These results suggest that the tragedy of the conventions is not that solutions do not exist, but that implementing them often requires the very coordination capacity that interdependences make unattainable. 

Chad Lee-Stronach is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Northeastern University. His research develops frameworks for understanding privacy, risk, and justice in an age of artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making. His work on legal epistemology, privacy theory, and AI ethics has been published in Noûs, Ethics, Philosophical Quarterly, and Canadian Journal of Philosophy. He has held fellowships at Harvard University's Safra Centre for Ethics (2023-24) and Stanford University's Centre for Ethics in Society (2019-20), and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. In this seminar, he will present his joint work with Rory Smead.