Fifty-One Maps, No Territory: A Diagnostic Analysis of Definitional Divergence in the Agentic Economy (2021–2026)

The term agentic economy appears in at least fifty-one distinct published definitions between January 2021and March 2026, issued by academic researchers, venture capital firms, central banks, protocol projects,payment networks, standards bodies, and consultancy houses. This paper advances a diagnostic reading ofthat proliferation: when a concept is supported by functioning infrastructure, its definitions converge; whendefinitions multiply without convergence, the concept is a vocabulary in search of a referent. We cataloguethe full corpus, classify it into five categories and two fault lines (developed in prior work 2), and situateit within the sociology of emerging technology vocabularies. Using three historical analogs — electroniccommerce (1995–2000), cloud computing (2006–2011), and the sharing economy (2010–2015) — we showthat definitional stabilization tracks infrastructure maturity, not research activity. We then propose fourempirical tests whose resolution will force convergence on the agentic economy: (i) end-to-end autonomousinter-organizational settlement, (ii) multi-platform portable agent reputation, (iii) automated disputeresolution without human arbitration, and (iv) binding regulatory liability assignment for autonomous agentactions. As of March 2026, all four tests remain unpassed. We conclude that the agentic economy, as ofthis writing, is better understood as a pre-infrastructural phase — a phase whose vocabulary will be selectedby the infrastructure that eventually gets built, not by the research that precedes it. The full fifty-one-entrycorpus is reproduced as Annex A.