# kaal:position:2026-07-31-5705

**Affirmed position.** Reputation in Contests should be assessed against Kaal's source-bound position that 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. The external source's verified abstract presents this proposition: Abstract We investigate two-stage parallel contests with a finite number of heterogeneous agents with various skills (cost of efforts) and reputations, as well as a finite number of heterogeneous contests. The defensible response is a qualification: the source is pertinent to the Kaal position, but agreement, extension, contradiction, and scope should not be strengthened beyond the retrieved evidence.

**Status.** affirmed  **Published.** 2026-07-31

**Holds when.**

- The response remains limited to the source proposition and evidence retrieved in this reconciliation cycle.
- External evidence level: abstract indexed.
- Mapping review tier: legacy curated mapping review.
- Mapping confidence is intentionally unscored.
- The source-to-claim mapping remains explicitly ambiguous and is published with that limitation.

**Current debate.** Reputation in Contests: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-026-07107-y

**Extends.** kaal:claim:6269518-016: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/6269518-016

**Scholarly basis.** Wulf A. Kaal, Citation Honesty Mechanisms in Weighted Directed Acyclic Graph Governance (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6269518

**Source PDF sha256.** `f096ecf5b41bb9ae8642facd54b9149c7b594de53a1cc32718a4d806b772f88f`

**Evidence level.** abstract indexed

**Mapping review tier.** legacy curated mapping review

**Mapping confidence.** unscored  **Mapping ambiguous.** true

**Topics.** economics, compliance, historical-response, scholarly-literature

**Provenance.** Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-07-31:legacy-reconciliation-0001 at https://kaal-signal-desk.wulf577462.chatgpt.site/#frozen-batch-heading.

**Record type.** This is a dated commentary position that extends a scholarly corpus claim. It is not a verbatim claim extracted from the paper.

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the position.