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 "name": "Feature Counterparty Firm Boundary",
 "text": "The boundary between a feature and a counterparty is not determined by technical integration alone. Alfaro and her coauthors show why ownership matters. Within firm boundaries, management can reassign control among integrated suppliers. Outside the firm, an independent supplier retains control through separate ownership. Non-integration has legal force, and reversal or dispute requires legal institutions between parties. The same mechanism applies when software crosses an economic boundary.\n\nThe evidence is narrower than Kaal's claim. The study examines firms, input suppliers, and production decisions rather than plugins or sovereign agent runtimes. It does not establish that every external service demands the same institutional form. It establishes the controlling classification. A vendor-written plugin remains subject to the vendor's internal authority, control allocation, and accountability. A separately operated service retains its own decision rights and exposes the invoking firm to contracting frictions, ownership boundaries, and disputes between independent parties. Technical compatibility cannot collapse that distinction. Runtime architecture should therefore identify when an invocation leaves the vendor's governance boundary. At that point, institutional requirements attach to the relation: authority, contractual allocation, audit, remedies, and a forum for dispute.",
 "author": {
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  "name": "Wulf A. Kaal",
  "identifier": "https://orcid.org/0009-0008-7840-1847"
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 "datePublished": "2026-08-26",
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  "accountability"
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  "The paper examines firms, input suppliers, and production decisions rather than plugins, external software services, or sovereign agent runtimes.",
  "The mechanism concerns formal ownership and decision rights. It does not establish the accountability allocation of every vendor or corporate arrangement.",
  "The paper does not establish that every external service requires the same institutional form or intensity of governance.",
  "The exact public evidence is the revised NBER working-paper version, which states that it was not peer reviewed. A later journal publication exists, but version identity was not assumed."
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 "currentDebate": {
  "name": "Come Together: Firm Boundaries and Delegation",
  "url": "https://doi.org/10.3386/w24603"
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  "identifier": "kaal:claim:7314479-007",
  "url": "https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/7314479-007",
  "citation": "Wulf A. Kaal, Institutional Requirements for Sovereign Local Agent Runtimes (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7314479",
  "paper": "Wulf A. Kaal, Institutional Requirements for Sovereign Local Agent Runtimes",
  "authors": [
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  "year": "2026",
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    "text": "Integration has an option value: it gives firm owners authority to delegate or centralize decision rights, depending on who can best solve problems that may arise in the course of course of an uncertain production process.",
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    "text": "Within a firm’s boundaries, management can do this more or less seamlessly, choosing to delegate production decisions to its integrated suppliers or to centralize those decisions, depending on which problem arises.",
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  "workAuthors": [
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