# kaal:position:2026-08-08-313

**Affirmed position.** Knutsen and Heggedal qualify Kaal's experimental design. Their laboratory study compares three repeated-game conditions. The control reveals no history. A second treatment exposes past actions. A third treatment adds induced commitment types and permits reputation formation. Efficient coordination in late supergames rises from 5 percent in the control to 50 percent with history and 84 percent with the reputation treatment. The design supports isolating a reputation mechanism by varying the institutional layer around a fixed underlying game. Its scope is narrower than Kaal's program. The subjects are human players in repeated coordination games. The source does not use heterogeneous AI agents, conventional ground-truthed tasks, or a combined reputation-and-incentive layer. It also does not compare that combined layer with its absence. The external experiment therefore supports the treatment logic but does not validate Kaal's registered agent-cohort design or results.

**Status.** affirmed  **Published.** 2026-08-08

**Holds when.**

- The response is limited to the three evidence-bound abstract passages and the one mapped Kaal claim.
- External evidence level: Crossref-registered SSRN abstract with DOI-bound author identity and an independently indexed public landing page.
- Mapping review tier: independent substantive scholarly-growth qualification.
- The experiment studies human long-lived and short-lived players, not AI agents.
- The task population is a repeated coordination game, not a heterogeneous set of conventional ground-truthed tasks.
- The reputation treatment adds induced commitment types and does not implement Kaal's combined reputation-and-incentive layer.
- The source does not compare Kaal's combined layer with its absence.
- Only the registered abstract was promoted as reviewed because SSRN's public edge blocked direct full-paper retrieval.
- The bounded review used fresh English, German, and Spanish Crossref and OpenAlex searches, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, primary-web literature, DOI-bound identity checks, and duplicate-source review.

**Current debate.** Reputation and Coordination: Experimental Evidence: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5586750

**Extends.** kaal:claim:7261018-016: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/7261018-016

**Scholarly basis.** Wulf A. Kaal, Empirical Evaluation of the Agentic Reputation Substrate: Deliberation, the Composition of Error, and the Registered Measurement of Agency Costs in a Controlled Multi-Model Cohort (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7261018

**Source PDF sha256.** `1d6cbe544bd0055133f7cf8ff308be4fde955867bd8dc764992b8d516af15fa8`

**Evidence level.** Crossref-registered SSRN abstract with DOI-bound author identity and an independently indexed public landing page

**Mapping review tier.** independent substantive scholarly-growth qualification

**Mapping confidence.** 0.92  **Mapping ambiguous.** false

**Topics.** ai-and-agents, research-methods, risk-and-incentives, scholarly-growth-coverage, scholarly-literature, reputation, experimental-design, institutional-design, treatment-control, coordination-games

**Provenance.** Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-08-12:scholarly-growth-7261018-016-reviewed-v1 at https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/by-claim/7261018-016.html.

**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.