# kaal:claim:6244278-021

**Claim.** Rational agents face a direct financial disincentive to cite prior contributions, because citation transfers economic value away from the citing agent; the mechanism design challenge is therefore to make honest citation the economically rational strategy.

**Type.** failure  **Support.** argued

**Holds when.**

- applies to weighted directed acyclic graph citation governance where citation transfers value

**Source quote.**

> rational agents face a direct financial disincentive to cite prior contributions.

**From.** Wulf A. Kaal, *AI's Mother's Instinct Engineered Consequence Emergent Ethics and the Institutional Trajectory Toward Agentic Alignment* (2026), VI.D Emergent Ethics: Virtue Through Iterated Consequence, page 14

**Cite as.** Wulf A. Kaal, AI's Mother's Instinct Engineered Consequence Emergent Ethics and the Institutional Trajectory Toward Agentic Alignment (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6244278

**Verify.** sha256 of source PDF `53533cdcc081184e7a376516ad4fece0a64ce49f6c8931b6a2c2e98ed914a84b` at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wulfkaal/Academic-Papers/main/papers/pdf/Kaal%20-%202026%20-%20AI%27s%20Mother%27s%20Instinct%20Engineered%20Consequence%20Emergent%20Ethics%20and%20the%20Institutional%20Trajectory%20Toward%20Agentic%20Alignment.pdf

**Failure mode.** citation disincentive  (family: staking-and-incentive-misalignment)

**Topics.** citation-and-knowledge, governance-design

**Keywords.** citation-honesty, attribution, mechanism-design, dag-governance

**Related claims.**

- generalizes: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/6269518-001

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