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February 9, 20260 citationsOpen Access

Legacy Constraints and Irreversible Path Dependence: A Formal Framework

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HAHaluk AksakMarmara University

Key Points

  • The aim is to formalize how legacy constraints lead to path dependence in various systems.
  • Develop a formal framework to analyze legacy constraints.
  • Examine how constraints accumulate and create historical lock-in.
  • Illustrate examples of technological and institutional persistence.
  • Demonstrated that legacy load increases irreversibly over time.
  • Established that exceeding thresholds results in locked trajectories.
  • Unified various forms of path dependence under a common geometric principle.

Abstract

We formalize how constraints accumulate over time to create path dependence, demon-strating that historical lock-in arises from structural necessity rather than contingent events.The legacy constraint load Llegacy(t) increases monotonically as systems activate compat-ibility constraints, shrinking feasible con guration spaces irreversibly. When legacy loadexceeds system-speci c thresholds, trajectories become locked into historical patterns inde-pendent of current incentives or information. This framework uni es technological lock-in(QWERTY), institutional persistence, and habit formation under a common geometric prin-ciple.Keywords: path dependence, legacy constraints, institutional persistence, technologicallock-in, irreversibility

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Cite This Study

Haluk Aksak (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/69897a14f0ec2af6756e85e4https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18516741
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