kaal:claim:3782210-040

The Maghribi traders show that reputation alone can sustain a decentralized network under extreme information asymmetry: using only handwritten letters, Jewish merchants built a reputational system spanning the Silk Road in which nothing but the promise of better reputation deterred agents from cheating.

Nothing incentivized the agents from cheating except the promise of building better reputation.

Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, The Importance of Reputation for the Evolution of Decentralization (2021), Summary, p. 15
https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782210 · source PDF

Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, The Importance of Reputation for the Evolution of Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782210

• historical trading networks with communication latency on the order of months
• agents with complete control of assets

empiricalsupport: evidencedempirical-evidenceai-and-agentscorporate-governancereputation

• extends kaal:claim:3782193-030 The strong trust that sustained Maghribi trade, in which embezzlement was rare despite extreme information asy...
• supports kaal:claim:3782201-009 Keeping a decentralized organization aligned in pursuit of its goals requires providing something more valuabl...
• extends kaal:claim:3782192-030 The Maghribi traders built a sophisticated decentralized trade network using the information technology of the...

The quote above is an exact substring of the source PDF, whose sha256 is 9cc531ab239f6266c8aeddcc8e54f4c06029c44e825444bee137bbcc0c9d0a8e. Extraction method: pdf-text-layer.
Attestation record: colloquium/attestations/67c6e21d47aa5810...json
Verify the binding yourself: curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782210-040.md | sha256sum