# kaal:claim:6421319-017

**Claim.** The Williamsonian justification for hierarchical governance evaporates when hyper rational agents can write and execute complete state contingent contracts at negligible cost, because the firm was an institutional response to the scarcity of human cognition.

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

**Holds when.**

- conditional on unbounded machine rationality and negligible contracting cost

**Source quote.**

> When hyper-rational agents can write and execute complete state-contingent contracts at negligible cost, the Williamsonian justification for hierarchical governance evaporates.

**From.** Wulf A. Kaal, *The Collapse of Scarcity Economics* (2026), IV.B. Williamson's Authority Relation Without Cognitive Justification, page 18

**Cite as.** Wulf A. Kaal, The Collapse of Scarcity Economics (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6421319

**Verify.** sha256 of source PDF `0f4f68e56ee48bb8b2d73d3ab7fd96fa572e76c195694ffa740360704c1b172d` at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wulfkaal/Academic-Papers/main/papers/pdf/Kaal%20-%202026%20-%20The%20Collapse%20of%20Scarcity%20Economics.pdf

**Failure mode.** Hierarchy Without Cognitive Justification  (family: human-judgment-displacement)

**Topics.** economics, institutional-design

**Keywords.** transaction-cost-economics, williamson, hierarchy, incomplete-contracts, firm-theory

**Related claims.**

- extends: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/5886442-017

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