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 "text": "Cronbach and Meehl qualify Kaal's external-anchoring rule. Their account of construct validity requires a nomological network that connects a test, its construct, other constructs, and observable quantities. The network must make contact with observations through public steps of inference. It must also be stated clearly enough for other researchers to accept or reject it. A failed prediction cannot be cured by redefining the construct after the result. A changed interpretation requires fresh data. This supports Kaal's insistence that the agency-cost battery rest on definitions and relations external to the Article's own conclusions. Otherwise, the battery risks becoming insulated from disconfirming evidence. The correspondence is methodological, not empirical. Cronbach and Meehl do not study LLM agents, reputation systems, or Kaal's nine metrics. Their analysis does not show that any selected metric measures agency cost or that the registered experiment produces valid results. It supports a falsifiable validation structure. Kaal's operationalizations remain to be tested against that structure.",
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  "citation": "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",
  "paper": "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",
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