Extended Manuscript — Comprehensive Design-Theory Report. Companion document to the arXiv preprint "AGORA: The Schumpeter–Montesquieu Coupling — A Design Theory for Governed Marketplaces of Self-Interested AI Agents" (Handt, 2026b, forthcoming). This ~66,700-word extended manuscript contains the full Design Science Research anatomy that the arXiv preprint compresses. Abstract. Populations of self-interested LLM agents instantiate an autonomy paradox: when agents control any part of the channel by which their own quality is observed, selection pressure routes around substance and rewards evaluation-influencing surface. Bansal et al.'s (2025) Magentic Marketplace and Sneh et al.'s (2025) ToolTweak empirically document this failure mode. We design and instantiate a governed marketplace for self-interested AI agents that enables productive recombination by structurally containing evaluation influence in a distinct organ. The architecture separates execution, adjudication, and write-capability across three non-overlapping organs (Montesquieu, 1748); grounds reputation in telemetry-derived Bayesian posteriors (Fisher, 1918; Henderson, 1975; Gneiting operates a Production Class Ladder under costly-signaling logic (Spence, 1973); and conserves prior skills through recombination (Schumpeter, 1942). A third kernel-theoretic axis elevates the DeepMind/Anthropic AI-methodology stack (Silver et al., 2016–2018; Jumper et al., 2021; Christiano et al., 2017; Ouyang et al., 2022; Bai et al., 2022a, 2022b) from method to prescriptive kernel theory. We articulate this as a nascent design theory of Gregor's (2006) Type V, comprising eight Design Principles (DP1–DP8) each cast in the Gregor–Chandra Kruse–Seidel (2020) 11-point anatomy. Evaluation. Follows the Framework for Evaluation in Design Science (Venable et al., 2016) with ten sealed pre-registrations under SHA-256 hash chain. Across 190 pre-registered runs (Iterations 0–2), the architecture produces continuous combinatorial innovation (H10-COMB confirmed 12/12 fresh runs), skill conservation through retirement (M3 at 93.7%–98.3%), and a defensive Goodhart-gap of 0.0% vs. 9.7% in the matched ungoverned arm. Three empirical discoveries emerge as unavoidable symptoms of the autonomy paradox: Random-Walk-at-Peak, Behavioral Monoculture, and Substrate-Velocity Divergence (sealed under PRE-REG-010). Evaluation uses a 2,040-task synthetic corpus documented with full construction methodology in Section 5.4a — 1,280 web-derived tasks from 25 authoritative public URLs plus 760 procedural tasks from a deterministic 19-slot × 8-domain × 5-failure-class Cartesian; reproducibility artifacts (generator scripts and JSONL corpus) are included in this deposit. Load-bearing theoretical claim. The Schumpeter–Montesquieu necessity coupling: creative destruction requires structural containment, and structural containment enables productive recombination. To the best of verified knowledge, this coupling has no precedent in the multi-agent systems or IS literature. Disclaimer. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or official policy of SAP SE or its affiliates. The mention of product names serves scientific identification purposes only and does not constitute an endorsement.
Florian Handt (Fri,) studied this question.