# kaal:claim:6269518-007

**Claim.** Under the standard citation-weighted payment formulation the dominant strategy for a self-interested agent is to cite no one and maximize self-attribution, which is the precise negation of honest knowledge attribution.

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

**Holds when.**

- standard PageRank-derived payment formulation
- self-interested agents
- no verification or penalty layer

**Source quote.**

> The rational strategy for any self-interested agent is therefore transparent: set cx = 0 for all j ≠ i (cite no one) to maximize personal payment. Under the standard formulation, the dominant strategy is maximal self-citation, which is the precise negation of honest knowledge attribution.

**From.** Wulf A. Kaal, *Citation Honesty Mechanisms in Weighted Directed Acyclic Graph Governance* (2026), II.A. Formal Statement of the Problem, page 6

**Cite as.** Wulf A. Kaal, Citation Honesty Mechanisms in Weighted Directed Acyclic Graph Governance (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6269518

**Verify.** sha256 of source PDF `f096ecf5b41bb9ae8642facd54b9149c7b594de53a1cc32718a4d806b772f88f` at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wulfkaal/Academic-Papers/main/papers/pdf/Kaal%20-%202026%20-%20Citation%20Honesty%20Mechanisms%20in%20Weighted%20Directed%20Acyclic%20Graph%20Governance.pdf

**Failure mode.** maximal self-citation dominant strategy  (family: reputation-system-gaming)

**Topics.** citation-and-knowledge, economics

**Keywords.** dominant-strategy, self-citation, under-citation, game-theory

**Related claims.**

- extends: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/6192998-014

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