The Other End of the Bridge: Economic Rationality When 15DD Faces a Party Who Does Not Enter 15DD
Asymmetric Perception, Cultivation, and Institutional Substitutes

Writing Declaration: This paper was independently authored by Han Qin. All intellectual decisions, framework design, and editorial judgments were made by the author.

Abstract

Paper 1 in this series diagnosed the incompleteness of economic rationality under the ideal bilateral-15DD condition (both parties perceive each other as ends). This paper relaxes that assumption. Bilateral 15DD is rare; the normal condition of real economic interaction is asymmetric: one party operates at 15DD, the other remains within 14DD — whether because they "haven't arrived" or because they "choose not to." The 15DD party runs the first half of "we" unilaterally, bearing the full cognitive costs of perception, inquiry, and C-seeking, with no corresponding receiver on the other side. "We" never began.

The core diagnostic difficulty is that "hasn't arrived" and "chooses not to" are behaviorally indistinguishable at the output level — an ontological undecidability, not a mere information gap. Yet this undecidability does not eliminate rational strategy. This paper shows that 15DD rationality under asymmetric conditions unfolds into two branches: cultivation (creating conditions for "we" to become possible) and recognizing non-cultivability (diagnosing that "we" will not emerge here), together with principled switching criteria between them. The paper further analyzes the asymmetric perceptual structure (the 15DD party sees the 14DD party's full interior; the 14DD party sees only a strategy set), the signals that accumulate to distinguish the two cases over time, and the special difficulty of locked-in relationships where exit is prohibitively costly — marriage, employment, the citizen-state tax relation. In those settings, institutions must stand in for the "we" that has not emerged, bearing the function of shared prohibitions. The institution is the best available substitute when "we" has not come into being.

Keywords: Self-as-an-End, economics, 14DD, 15DD, asymmetric rationality, cultivation, non-cultivability, institutional design, relational contract, bilateral subjecthood