# kaal:claim:6269518-016

**Claim.** Because policing protocol deviants is expensive, it is individually more efficient to assume others comply and skip policing, which yields a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium in which eventually fewer than half of members police and the system can be gamed.

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

**Holds when.**

- policing is costly to the individual
- members can free-ride on the policing of others

**Source quote.**

> This gives a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium leading to a situation where eventually less than 50% of the members actually perform the policing, meaning the system can be gamed.

**From.** Wulf A. Kaal, *Citation Honesty Mechanisms in Weighted Directed Acyclic Graph Governance* (2026), III. The Missing Game-Theoretic Proof, page 9

**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.** policing free-rider equilibrium  (family: collective-action-and-coordination-failure)

**Topics.** economics, compliance

**Keywords.** policing-costs, free-riding, subgame-perfect-equilibrium, enforcement

**Related claims.**

- supports: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782203-037
- extends: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782192-015

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