# kaal:claim:3782193-012

**Claim.** When a law is written down rigorously, specifying precisely what is acceptable and unacceptable, competition obliges people to find the most efficient behavior available inside those rules, which is typically behavior located right at the boundary of what is permissible.

**Type.** mechanism  **Support.** argued

**Holds when.**

- competitive environments
- rigorously codified rules

**Source quote.**

> When a law is written down rigorously, specifying precisely what is acceptable and not acceptable, people are obligated by competition to find the most efficient behavior possible within those rules.

**From.** Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, *Historical Sketches of Centralization vs. Decentralization* (2021), Prehistory of information technology, page 6

**Cite as.** Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, Historical Sketches of Centralization vs. Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782193

**Verify.** sha256 of source PDF `74df9cc9a19a098bdacd0424a4174795f6e184f7a31c8ee7541195186701ebd2` at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wulfkaal/Academic-Papers/main/papers/pdf/Calcaterra%20and%20Kaal%20-%202021%20-%20Historical%20Sketches%20of%20Centralization%20vs.%20Decentralization.pdf

**Failure mode.** Boundary probing under codified law  (family: enforcement-gap)

**Topics.** risk-and-incentives, economics, decentralization

**Keywords.** letter-of-the-law, boundary-behavior, competition, policing-costs, protocol-centralization

**Related claims.**

- extended_by: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782203-003

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the claim. Its sha256 is the content hash used for attestation.