# kaal:position:2026-08-28-003

**Affirmed position.** Resnick, Zeckhauser, Friedman, and Kuwabara support one component of Kaal's counterparty-selection claim: a reputation system collects, distributes, and aggregates feedback about past behavior so parties who do not know one another can decide whom to trust. Their 2000 article also qualifies portability. It reports that cross-system rating transfer failed in practice and that limited distribution confined reputation's effect to one online arena. The article does not compare reputation with contract, regulation, or brand and does not establish that those alternatives fail at machine speed. Its support reaches only the stranger-trust function of aggregated past conduct.

**Status.** affirmed  **Published.** 2026-08-28

**Holds when.**

- Human online markets rather than autonomous-agent transactions.
- No evidence concerning contract, regulation, or brand at machine speed.
- Portability was limited and long-lived identity was an operating precondition.

**Current debate.** Reputation Systems: https://rzeckhauser.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/reputation-systems

**Extends.** kaal:claim:7314479-043: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/7314479-043

**Scholarly basis.** Wulf A. Kaal, Institutional Requirements for Sovereign Local Agent Runtimes (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7314479

**Source PDF sha256.** `debace24a155ae924a155b1fafe98856d98cf83689feff2f87a32f1c06171ce6`

**Evidence level.** permitted_full_text

**Mapping review tier.** independent evidence-first compound-growth review

**Mapping confidence.** unscored  **Mapping ambiguous.** false

**Topics.** reputation, economics, institutional-design, ai-and-agents

**Provenance.** Affirmed in kaal-growth:2026-08-28:daily-001-remediated-v1 at https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions-src/2026-08-28-compound-growth-kaal-growth-2026-08-28-daily-001-remediated-v1.json.

**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.