Abstract

Institutional and systems-level theories have operated for more than 35 years without a formal micro-foundation that specifies how individual decisions aggregate into collective outcomes. Coleman (1990) identified the micro-macro problem but did not supply the micro-level engine. Ostrom (1990, 2005) built the most thorough institutional analysis framework but acknowledged the need for better models of individual action. Schelling (1978) demonstrated that micro-motives produce macro-behavior but did not formalize the cascade mechanism or identify which individual-level forces drive action. No existing framework connects a domain-general theory of individual action-production to a specified mechanism of institutional emergence and systemic change. This paper proposes the Unified Cascade Theory (UCT), a macro-level framework that formally specifies how individual decisions, as modeled by the Integrated Action-Driver Theory’s (IADT) four-pillar multiplicative architecture (Mehrhoff, 2026, “Integrated Action-Driver Theory (IADT): A General Theory of Human Decision-Making Under Complexity”), cascade into institutional and systemic outcomes through three sequential phases: ignition (threshold crossing when individual IADT configurations reach critical alignment), polarization (divergence amplification through self-reinforcing institutional momentum), and exhaustion (cascade termination when driving forces deplete or encounter countervailing forces). Three illustrative cases (COVID-19 policy cascades, cryptocurrency adoption, democratic backsliding) demonstrate the three-phase architecture across domains. Five formal propositions and three research designs are advanced, providing a testable pathway for empirical validation. The UCT, grounded in the empirically tested IADT, provides the micro-macro bridge that institutional analysis has lacked since Coleman first articulated the problem.

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the author

Six frontiers. Seventeen years. Three Laws of Decision-Making.

Patrick Mehrhoff is a German entrepreneur, independent researcher, AI engineer, and author. He is the author of the three original theories that constitute the Mehrhoff Research Program. He built the work the studio carries.

Most practitioners spend a career inside one domain. He worked as a practitioner at six of the frontiers that redefined how society organises information, money, and value over the last two decades. The consumer internet, Swiss fintech, European monetary policy, Southeast Asian financial publishing, institutional crypto assets, and the first wave of applied AI.

The same structural observation appeared at every frontier. By 2019, on a whiteboard at crypto infrastructure provider Wyden in Zurich, the pattern had become visible to itself. It did not yet have a name. Four years before any AI language model became publicly available, the complete logic of the Three Laws of Decision-Making was already on the whiteboard.

The studio was built from Bangkok, without institutional affiliation and without external funding. The Rubens workshop model defines how it operates. The founder sets the intellectual direction at every decisive step. The tools and collaborators execute within it.

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