Exit Costs and Coordination Depletion: Extraction, Intervention, and the Dynamics of Institutional Regime Transition

Institutions that fund the maintenance of their control apparatus by drawing down the voluntary coordination on which they depend cannot occupy a stationary state. This paper formalizes that claim and derives its consequences for stabilization policy. It distinguishes two layers that macroeconomic analysis routinely conflates: claims — money, bonds, transfers, issuable without limit — and substrate: the voluntary coordination expressed as trust, initiative, effort beyond contract, and family formation, which no instrument mints. Because the standard stabilization toolkit operates exclusively on the claims layer, interventions that defend the apparatus relocate rather than resolve the underlying depletion, through three export channels — monetary, spatial, and coercive — whose capacities are bounded and empirically observable. The central analytical result extends the exit-cost literature: the sign of an ongoing economic game is determined not by its payoff matrix but by its exit condition, which has two components — the mechanical cost of leaving and the epistemic cost of learning that one should. Games cheap to exit in both components are positive-sum by selection; compelled games are negative-sum by the standing cost of compulsion. The condition subsumes the lemons dynamic (Akerlof, 1970) and prospect-theoretic misestimation (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979), and reclassifies the canonical collective-action dilemmas as properties of configuration rather than of cooperation as such, consistent with Ostrom (1990). A minimal three-stock dynamical model then demonstrates that three claimed behaviours are generic consequences of the stated mechanisms rather than assumptions: a discontinuous regime flip at a critical exit cost; an intervention asymmetry that converts survivable degradation into extinction; and the uniqueness, within the explored parameter space, of a loss-coupled successor structure as the trajectory on which the substrate recovers. The paper closes by deriving design conditions for such a structure and stating five falsification criteria. Part of The Exit Papers, a research series on claims, substrate, and institutional regime transition. Paper I (doi:10.5281/zenodo.23052657): empirical diagnosis · Paper II (doi:10.5281/zenodo.23052740): theoretical mechanism · Paper III (doi:10.5281/zenodo.23052742): protocol application. Each paper is self-contained.