Theory & Research
CashPop is, at its most ambitious framing, an instrument for measuring distributed common knowledge at planetary scale. The game-theoretic, mechanism-design, and empirical foundations behind it are documented in this section.
Sub-pages
- Beauty Contest Foundation — Keynes (1936), Stahl & Wilson (1995), and the level-k structure.
- Sybil-Resistance Economics — the marginal-cost model behind the Trust Ladder.
- Social Experiment Methodology — what we measure, how, and why it matters.
- Open Datasets — quarterly aggregate releases under CC-BY-4.0.
In two paragraphs
The mechanism CashPop implements is Keynes' Beauty Contest. The earliest formalization appears in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Keynes, 1936): newspaper readers were invited to pick the six most beautiful faces from a hundred photographs; the prize went to readers whose picks were closest to the average pick. Keynes observed that the rational strategy is not to pick the most beautiful faces by one's own taste, but to pick what one expects the average reader to pick — and, recursively, what one expects the average reader expects the average reader to pick. This is the structure of every CashPop Round.
In academic literature, this game has been studied as a benchmark for measuring strategic depth (Stahl & Wilson, 1995; Camerer, Ho, Chong, 2004), for separating focal-point coordination from pure best-response (Mehta, Starmer, Sugden, 1994), and for testing wisdom-of-crowds aggregation (Galton, 1907 → Surowiecki, 2004 → contemporary prediction markets). What none of these studies could do is run the game at planetary scale, in real time, across cultural strata, with cryptographic auditability. CashPop does that. The resulting dataset — released openly each quarter — is the protocol's most enduring contribution.