failure family

staking and incentive misalignment

53 claims across 30 works.

• split-the-difference-arbitration: Compensating arbitrators by the number of cases they hear gives litigants a substantial role in shaping the system but may yield decisions so eager to
• majority-reward-incentive-distortion: The economic incentive for Aragon judges to follow the more popular vote, since judges keep their bond only if they voted with the majority, calls int
• nothing at stake: The tragedy of the commons arises in any system lacking a well designed incentive structure; in blockchain proof of stake design this is the nothing a
• pyramid scheme expertise tag: A healthy expertise tag requires that fees from new commenters buying in remain smaller in the long term than fees from outside business; otherwise th
• late entrant disincentive: Because earlier minted tokens pay out more than later ones at a steady fee rate, later experts have less motivation to join, and the remedy available
• fee mismatch arbitration failure: Arbitration on the platform fails at either end of the fee range: if the parties set fees too low the selected arbiter refuses the work and the arbitr
• consensus contributions unrewarded: If tokens minted for each post carry equal weight, then uncontroversial comments are not rewarded at all, because a universally upvoted improvement le
• voting crowds out commenting: Under equal token weighting a successful poster receives no greater reward than the upvoters who merely read and vote, so the system pays the same for
• speculative-incentive-design: Crypto-economic incentive design is only limitedly successful at shaping future human behavior, because the designer must speculate about future human
• unqualified-monetary-policy-designer: The democratization of monetary policy in token economies creates a serious problem, because token designers lack the qualifications and institutional
• Monodimensional gamification: Existing decentralized gamification attempts for micro task workers fail because they are monodimensional and permit earning only by playing the game,
• capped-raise-frenzy: Capped ICO raises, adopted to address investor uncertainty about platform valuation in uncapped raises, backfire by creating strong incentives for inv
• altruism-cliff: The current dominance of altruists in the crypto space will not persist: once the crypto economy matures, an influx of hedgers and rent seekers can be
• late-entrant-disincentive: Because earlier sem tokens represent a larger percentage of the total and therefore pay out more, later experts have less motivation to join when fees
• fungible-payment-capture: If curators and contractors are paid from a fungible currency source without a direct or indirect penalty for underperformance, such as lower token sc
• single-sided-incentives: Participants must be incentivized to improve their own utility while simultaneously benefiting the institution over the long run; without that duality
• Strategic breach when token value falls below claim: A breach occurs only when the underwriters concerned believe that the value of their encumbered tokens is less than the payment they would have to mak
• shareholder-collusion-on-minting: Distributing newly minted coins to shareholders, as Basis planned, is exploitable: shareholders can collude to hold their new money and drive the pric
• expectation-of-free-node-service: In the contemporary climate these taxes and fees are unlikely to be implemented appropriately, because internet culture has trained users to expect fr
• unmastered incentive duality: DAO designs at the beginning of the 2020s did not effectively master the duality of incentives that a workable DAO governance design requires.
• capped raise induces investor frenzy: Capped ICO raises, adopted by the crypto community to reduce investor uncertainty about platform valuation in uncapped raises, backfire because the ca
• success-penalty-in-per-connection-pricing: Per connection pricing by ISPs penalized success: creators whose pages became popular faced charges scaling with traffic, and individuals with popular
• Incentive Duality Failure: Effective institutional governance, human or machine, requires a duality of incentives in which actors improve their own utility while their actions b
• suboptimal social proof incentive design: The social media coordination function is still largely flawed because the incentive design underlying social proof is suboptimal; decentralized techn
• underwriting breach: In the Underwriting DAO a breach occurs only when the market values the encumbered reputation tokens at less than the payout, which requires minting a
• transparency privacy tradeoff: Greater transparency is in tension with more open membership, because larger networks are only achieved when privacy is ensured.
• currency as proximal goal: When currency is the entire proximal goal of a transaction, all participants naturally behave as selfishly as possible and exploit any opportunity for
• incentive deficit: The main problem with all current peer to peer governance structures is the lack of proper incentivization: participants are not motivated to improve
• expansion dependent stability: The alternatives to a reputational system for countering profit driven instability, namely external stabilizing forces such as governmental fiat and r
• Unbalanced reward structure: Good ideas will fail to be implemented unless the reward structure is balanced, because people rarely keep working idealistically toward group goals w
• exclusion driven node shutdown: Validators who learned they would receive no reward shut down their nodes rather than waiting for the incentivization phase to end, so a reward scheme
• opaque reward eligibility: Opacity about reward eligibility is itself a source of dysfunction: during the first phase of the 2021 Casper testnet it was unclear which validators
• reward seeking crowding out expertise: Reward focused participation crowds out technical engagement: many Casper testnet participants lacked the expertise to run nodes, and their questions
• unsustainable-open-source: From a game theory perspective the open source culture advocated in the Web3 movement is not sustainable in the long term unless it is married with a
• Reliance on good will: The failure of many DAOs to date is traceable to their reliance on the good will of network members rather than on engineered incentives.
• DAO extinction by fee loss: DAOs are free to organize as they choose, and those that fail to find the right incentives for productive behavior will certainly go extinct, because
• Smart contract zero-sum trap: Self-executing, self-regulating smart contracts between anonymous parties in an open system create a near perfect zero-sum situation unless the DAO al
• equity collapse through eliminated reward: A society that levels material outcomes completely undermines its own equity: eliminating all individual reward crushes the meritocratic instinct, pow
• unclear-utility-token-regulatory-status: The regulatory status of securities tokens is rather well established, whereas the regulatory status of utility tokens remains unclear.
• No Incentive to Find Flaws: The collective of reviewers in legacy code review is not incentivized to find flaws in the code, because the review is treated as the work product of
• Asymmetric Payoff for Net Negative Ventures: Impact markets that promote retrospective funding and resale of impact carry an inherent risk of incentivizing net negative ventures, because individu
• Nothing at Stake Voting: The existing fund allocation model is afflicted by uninformed voters, sockpuppets and other gamesmanship, by voting with nothing at stake, and by voti
• deferred obligation drag: Traditional corporate loyalty programs fail because they saddle issuers with delayed obligations and cannot hold participants without pushing them tow
• citation disincentive: Rational agents face a direct financial disincentive to cite prior contributions, because citation transfers economic value away from the citing agent
• design parameter failure: The evolutionary arc from consequence to care is not guaranteed: it depends on correct institutional design at each phase, including appropriate slash
• under-citation incentive: Under existing citation-weighted reputation formulations, rational agents face a direct financial disincentive to cite prior contributions, because Pa
• structural rather than calibration flaw: The under-citation incentive is a structural flaw in the mechanism design, not a parameter calibration issue that could be corrected by retuning exist
• implicit maximal leaching: The citation-weighted payment mechanism in multi-agent settings effectively operates with an implicit leaching parameter of one, since every unit of c
• knowledge-hoarding: When foundational work earns no downstream credit, the contributor's optimal strategy shifts to hoarding knowledge or publishing only when full value
• Unrewarded generation: An architecture with an action surface but no reward channel implements generation as an unrewarded act, so rational agents will not allocate compute
• Off-protocol generation: An architecture with a reward channel but no action surface implements generation as an off-protocol act whose outputs cannot enter the protocol's act
• Generation not internalized: HDCA supplies neither an action surface nor a reward channel for generation, and this is the architectural reason HDCA cannot host Computative Economi
• Quantity-only reward: Without a representation of the possibility space distinct from the current mempool of pending instances, no quality metric can be computed, and witho