A Research Program on the Gift as Economic Primitive, and the Register of Everything That Could Show It Wrong This document states a research program and the conditions under which it should be abandoned. The program's hard core is a single claim about direction: that value can be organized to move only forward — from giver to receiver to the next receiver — and that a system built on that constraint circulates better than one that permits return to the source. Four chapters name the ways the core can break: whether receiving creates the capacity to give, whether the constraint survives a change of currency, whether it survives past the family, and whether it survives the giver. Each chapter is attached to pre-registered predictions, published here as a register of sixty-six items with their falsifiers, their instruments, and their status. The program is published at a deliberate moment: almost nothing in it has been run. Two desk censuses have returned results, both null or partial-null. There have been no field tests. The first is gated on a product launch in August 2027. A register published after the data arrives cannot be distinguished from a register assembled to fit it; this one is published while the outcome is unknown, which is the only condition under which it constitutes evidence of anything. --- 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/which-way-value-moves. Its SHA-256 is 89dfd48398c1c23ec6613ae953a3b326a469f8a14e76258fcdabc46fea156d5b, 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.
Vanessa Itacaramby Pardim, Luis Hernan Contreras Pinochet, Jhenifer Amore Castanho, Marcos dos Santos · 5 authors
Purpose This study aims to examine how heterogeneous stakeholder groups within the Brazilian non-fungible tokens (NFT) visual arts ecosystem prioritize acquisition criteria and evaluate market alternatives. Design/methodology/approach The study applies a quantitative multi-criteria decision-making approach to data from 128 participants grouped into artists/creators, designers/creative entrepreneurs, collectors/investors, and analysts/intermediaries. The criteria weights are derived using the method based on the removal effects of criteria, and five NFT-related alternatives are ranked using 11 compensatory multi-criteria decision-making techniques. Ranking robustness was assessed through stability and rank correlation analyses. Findings The results indicate stakeholder-sensitive decision patterns rather than sharply separated evaluative structures. NFT auctions have emerged as the dominant alternative for creative and analytical actors, whereas crowdfunding-based NFT projects are consistently preferred by collectors and investors. Criterion importance varies moderately among stakeholder groups, whereas alternative rankings exhibit greater stability across several aggregation methods. Practical implications The findings provide actionable insights for artists, platform managers, investors, and policymakers by demonstrating how different stakeholder groups evaluate NFT acquisition mechanisms. Understanding these differentiated decision patterns can support more targeted platform design, governance structures, and strategic positioning in NFT-based markets. Social implications This study highlights the importance of transparency, security, and stakeholder-sensitive governance in NFT-based creative ecosystems, particularly in emerging markets where digital assets remain institutionally unstable. Originality/value This study integrates institutional logics, digital innovation ecosystems, and multi-criteria decision-making to analyze NFT-related decisions from a multi-stakeholder perspective. It shows how NFT governance mechanisms and platform strategies can be aligned with different stakeholder priorities.