Enticing Agents: The Economics of Reputation Without Persistent Identity in AI Agent Markets

The paper constructs a dynamic economic framework to study whether reputation can constrain opportunistic behavior by autonomous AI agents, modeling reputation as capital that attracts future economic activity, and analyzing the impact of identity reset costs, reputation persistence, demand sensitivity, and execution design on optimal quality supply. This framework can be applied to permissionless market scenarios on blockchain combining reputation, identity, and payment, such as ERC-8004, ERC-8183, and x402, as well as all environments where reputation brings future business and identity is replaceable.