Rotational discovery over a non-accumulating liveness signal — a local-discovery layer with no recipient-facing surface, no recipient aggregate and no impression count, in which admission is a predicate over circulation rather than a score, order is a publicly recomputable rotation, and the turn belongs to the giver. The liveness signal named in this paper's title is an admission predicate, not a weighted input to a ranking function. We state this first because the paper's whole content follows from it: a weighted input produces an order, an order is a rank, and a rank is the thing this design exists to do without. Local discovery — routing a person to a nearby business they do not yet know — is presently solved by ranked, purchasable surfaces. That solution has a structural bias toward scale which is mechanical rather than malicious: an auction allocates visibility to the highest bidder per acquired customer, and the highest bidder is reliably whoever has the largest lifetime value, the best measurement, the cheapest capital, and the widest geography over which to amortise creative production. A single-location business is priced out of the discovery layer by construction. Reputation systems built to correct this — consumer review platforms above all — have been captured repeatedly, and we argue the capture follows from a shared property rather than from bad management: reviews are fungible, and they are aggregated into a per-recipient total, so both the fake-review market and the placement-upsell business have something to attach to. We specify a discovery layer with no such total. Admission is a predicate over circulation — a rate, not a stock, derived from how often a participant's balance returns to zero — evaluated as a boolean with amplitude excluded, so that the smallest circulating operator is admitted exactly as much as the largest, and so that admission cannot be accumulated toward. Order is a publicly recomputable rotation. The turn belongs to the giver, arising at the moment they spend from a forward-only, locality-restricted account, from which it follows that the system has no recipient-facing surface and therefore nothing to sell to the parties it routes people toward. Where a real relational path exists — someone the viewer has themselves thanked has thanked this recipient — that single named hop is shown instead; a path is one act by one named person and cannot sum. We are explicit about what this does not achieve. The design does not prevent concentration. It prevents compounding. Givers will still choose the familiar, so the outcome distribution may remain heavy-tailed; what the design removes is the return edge of the feedback loop, because there is no recipient total for an outcome to accumulate into. A ranked system has a ratchet — visible, therefore chosen, therefore more visible. This one does not. That is a smaller claim than "no gradient," and it is the one we can defend. We are equally explicit about the costs. Quality degrades relative to ranking: find me the best pho in town is a question this system permanently refuses, and we answer only pho near me, by distance. Discovery becomes intermittent, because admission is bound to a named operator's presence rather than to premises. The isolation inequity documented elsewhere in this corpus — those whose kindness is less legible circulate less and are therefore seen less — is not repaired here. And the design contains exactly one number, the liveness window, which must be published, global and rarely changed, because a window tuned per recipient or per district is a ranking knob wearing a predicate's clothes. Finally we note that the routing primitive is not new to this corpus and we do not claim it. Steward-Routed Alms (July 2026) already published rotation-as-router for monastic invitation, on the explicit ground that no evaluative metric may exist anywhere in the system. What is new here is the substitute for ordination. In the monastic case admission is a durable institutional status; in a commercial setting there is no ordination, and the mechanism needs some criterion that admits without ranking and cannot be accumulated toward. The liveness predicate is that substitute, and supplying it is what generalises a monastic routing rule into a discovery layer. Offered defensively to the commons under CC0. Keywords: unranked discovery, rotational routing, non-accumulating reputation, liveness signal, popularity-gradient-free ranking, giver-side discovery, local commerce, sortition, rotating savings and credit association, impression-free advertising alternative, defensive publication. --- Provenance. This paper is part of the THonly research corpus, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. The canonical version is at https://thonly.org/research/rotation-over-liveness. Its SHA-256 is 072c25d396930668cc6fe1a503615f108ba81ddd2e68415adba5933b8ddd169b, independently timestamped to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps and signed under RFC 3161 by three trust authorities, one of them eIDAS-qualified. AI co-authorship is disclosed. Miss Aquarius is the consistent name used for the AI collaboration across all venues.
The future architecture of financial systems is a subject of contention, with centralized and decentralized governance proponents. Here, we ask the following question. Would the architecture affect the quality of decision making? We propose a game where financial network participants demarcate the ownership of claims to income. This governance task can be decentralized (shared authority), centralized (single authority), or hybrid (alternating authority). Without communication, all architectures supported poor outcomes. With communication, decentralization ensured good governance and maximum profits, whereas centralization did not—lowering communication’s potency in promoting socially optimal decisions. This indicates that there is scope for decentralization in innovating financial institutions. This paper has been accepted by Camelia Kuhnen for the Virtual Special Issue on Digital Finance. Funding: N. Chemaya acknowledges partial financial support from the NET Institute. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2025.02314 .
Commitment branching is a novel approach to modeling strategic interaction in multi-agent systems, particularly within the context of blockchain and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). This paper introduces the concept of a state [s] that can potentially support multiple commitments, denoted as [P] and [Q]. These commitments lead to distinct computational trajectories, represented as [P → T_P] and [Q → T_Q]. The core of the model lies in the definition of B_C(s), which quantifies the number of distinct branching possibilities originating from a given intermediate state. This branching behavior directly reflects the potential for divergent strategies and the inherent complexity of decentralized decision-making. The model offers a simplified yet powerful framework for analyzing the dynamics of commitment and its impact on system evolution. Further exploration of this framework could lead to improved strategies for managing risk, optimizing resource allocation, and enhancing the robustness of decentralized systems.
This paper introduces Automated Institutional Discovery (AID), a novel computational framework that conceptualizes economic institutional design as a high-dimensional combinatorial search problem. Traditional institutional design relies heavily on human intuition, historical evolution, or analytically constrained mechanism design, which often fails in complex, adaptive multi-agent environments. AID transcends these limitations by framing institutions as tuples i = (r_1, r_2, ..., r_K) within an expansive institutional space and utilizing advanced search and optimization algorithms to discover configurations that maximize global objective functions F(i). By combining multi-agent simulation modeling with metaheuristic search strategies, AID evaluates allocative efficiency, incentive compatibility, resilience, and distributional equity without requiring empirical laboratory experiments. The framework establishes a paradigm shift from manual rule-making to automated machine discovery, offering robust applications for digital economies, decentralized finance, and economic governance.
This paper develops a Quantum-Institutional Automated Negotiation (QIAN) algorithm as an intelligent decision support system for carbon credit markets, contributing to quantum game theory applications in automated negotiation and institutional decision-making. We extend the Eisert–Wilkens–Lewenstein (EWL) framework by introducing an Institutional Filter Function Φ_C that maps continuous quantum strategies—phase shifts and superpositions—onto finite, legally viable contract archetypes. This filter models regulatory, political, and organizational constraints that collapse the infinite quantum strategy space into a tractable finite set, enabling computationally efficient decision support. We prove convergence of the automated negotiation algorithm to a Pareto-superior Nash Equilibrium and demonstrate, through Monte Carlo simulation with literature-calibrated parameters, that the collapsed quantum equilibrium yields a mean joint utility uplift of 13.5% over classical cooperation (95% CI: 9.8%–17.3%, p < 0.001), with the upper bound reaching 17.3% and 26.8% of simulations achieving uplifts in the 15–30% range. The framework maps directly to blockchain-based smart contracts, providing a deployable mechanism for sustainable carbon markets that aligns with SDG 13 (Climate Action) and SDG 17 (Partnerships). This work advances quantum game theory from abstract formalism to computational institutional design, offering a novel decision support approach for negotiation analysis under real-world constraints.