# Policing costs

`kaal:entity:policing-costs`

**Status.** derived

This node is assembled mechanically from the 7 claims that carry the concept tag `policing-costs`. 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

7 claims across 5 works, 2021 to 2026.

**2021**

- [3782192-015](https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782192-015) [failure/argued] *(failure mode)* -- As members constantly probe the edge of acceptable behavior, policing the rules becomes more expensive, the rules become divorced from the shared goals, and relationships become brittle and formal instead of warm and loose.
  > As members constantly probe the edge of acceptable behavior, policing the rules becomes more expensive. The rules become divorced from the shared goals. Relationships become brittle and formal instead of warm and loose.
  Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, Introduction to Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782192
- [3782192-020](https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782192-020) [mechanism/argued] -- Governing by transcendental values, ideals that everyone understands but no one can concretely attain, reduces members' motivation to probe the limits of acceptable behavior and therefore reduces the policing the organization must pay for.
  > If the or- ganization is governed by transcendental values—ideals that everyone understands yet they can never practically attain or properly instantiate concretely—then people have less motivation to probe the limits of acceptable behavior. Less policing is then required
  Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, Introduction to Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782192
- [3782193-012](https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782193-012) [mechanism/argued] *(failure mode)* -- When a law is written down rigorously, specifying precisely what is acceptable and unacceptable, competition obliges people to find the most efficient behavior available inside those rules, which is typically behavior located right at the boundary of what is permissible.
  > When a law is written down rigorously, specifying precisely what is acceptable and not acceptable, people are obligated by competition to find the most efficient behavior possible within those rules.
  Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, Historical Sketches of Centralization vs. Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782193
- [3782193-013](https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782193-013) [mechanism/argued] -- Because a transcendental value is by definition not rigorously formalizable, people organizing around an eternally unobtainable ideal without clear boundaries are less likely to probe the boundaries of acceptable behavior.
  > On the other hand, a transcendental value by defini- tion is not rigorously formalizable. When people organize around an eternally unob- tainable ideal without clear boundaries, they are less likely to probe the boundaries of what is acceptable.
  Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, Historical Sketches of Centralization vs. Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782193
- [3782203-018](https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782203-018) [mechanism/argued] *(failure mode)* -- Reputation policing games explain why a business will rationally tolerate a small level of theft when policing costs more than the loss, which also explains the rationality of long-term parasitic and bullying relationships and creates a need for careful protocol design to prevent that corruption.
  > Similar game setups with reputation policing explain the situation where a busi- ness will rationally tolerate a small level of theft when policing is more expensive, such as when a grocer will ignore a street urchin who nabs an apple once per day.
  Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, A Technical Perspective on Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782203
- [3782210-003](https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782210-003) [failure/argued] *(failure mode)* -- Strict legal enforcement is an inefficient remedy for opportunism because every unit of energy devoted to policing is energy that could instead have been used to cooperate productively.
  > Strict legal enforcement is not efficient, because all energies devoted to policing are ener- gies that could be used to cooperate productively.
  Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, The Importance of Reputation for the Evolution of Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782210

**2026**

- [6269518-016](https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/6269518-016) [failure/argued] *(failure mode)* -- 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.
  > 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.
  Wulf A. Kaal, Citation Honesty Mechanisms in Weighted Directed Acyclic Graph Governance (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6269518

## 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/policing-costs.md | sha256sum

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