# Maghribi traders

`kaal:entity:maghribi-traders`

**Status.** derived

This node is assembled mechanically from the 3 claims that carry the concept tag `maghribi-traders`. It is a roster of what the corpus says under this term. It is **not** an adjudicated definition: no single statement here has been ruled canonical, and no first-appearance call has been made. Read the claims and judge for yourself.

## Every claim under this term

3 claims across 3 works, 2021 to 2021.

**2021**

- [3782193-030](https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782193-030) [empirical/evidenced] -- The strong trust that sustained Maghribi trade, in which embezzlement was rare despite extreme information asymmetry, cannot be explained by a strong centralized government, since the Maghribis could not form a centralized legal or political hierarchy and the official legal channels were slow and unreliable.
  > In point of fact, the records show that such embezzlement was rare. Instead, a strong sense of trust pervaded. So what mechanism protected the principals from their agents' asymmetric information? The answer was not a strong centralized gov- ernment.
  Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, Historical Sketches of Centralization vs. Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782193
- [3782201-009](https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782201-009) [condition/argued] -- Keeping a decentralized organization aligned in pursuit of its goals requires providing something more valuable than money, namely reputation, following the Maghribi traders' example.
  > In order to keep a decentralized organization aligned in the pursuit of their goals, you must provide something more valuable than money: reputation.
  Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, Future of Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782201
- [3782210-040](https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782210-040) [empirical/evidenced] -- 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). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782210

## Verify

Every claim above resolves to a record carrying a verbatim source quote, the sha256 of the source PDF, and a preformatted citation. Nothing here asks to be taken on trust.

    curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/entities/maghribi-traders.md | sha256sum

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of this entity node. Its sha256 is the content hash.