Incentives, Collective Action, and Adoption in Generative Relational Academic Infrastructure

An infrastructure that records how understanding changes faces a set of difficulties that are economic and institutional in place of technical. This paper states them and assesses what can be done about each. It locates the commons dilemma precisely: knowledge is non-rival, so the tragedy that governs pastures has no object there, and the subtractable goods are review capacity, maintainer labour, the instrument, and community trust. It establishes that recognition is a positional good, so competition for standing cannot be dissolved by any degree of openness, and that an open selection process is an all-pay contest in which aggregate effort is dissipated. It proposes one test distinguishing a generative arrangement from a competitive one, namely whether content from unselected lines of work is absorbed with attribution, and shows that the test is also the condition under which a staged selection design survives backward induction. It then treats adoption: the cost of recording falls hardest on those with least standing, the benefits are collective and deferred, and a group adopting the arrangement is selected against in an environment that rewards output rate. Two conditions follow, that the minimal tier be worth adopting by a single participant and that a release emit the artefact the incumbent system accepts, and the empirical record of research infrastructure is read against them. The paper closes with predictions and the conditions under which the account would be shown wrong.