| Abstract: |
A central challenge in economics and artificial intelligence is explaining how
financial behaviors-such as credit, insurance, and trade-emerge without formal
institutions. We argue that these functions are not products of institutional
design, but structured extensions of a single behavioral substrate:
reciprocity. Far from being a derived strategy, reciprocity served as the
foundational logic of early human societies-governing the circulation of
goods, regulation of obligation, and maintenance of long-term cooperation well
before markets, money, or formal rules. Trade, commonly regarded as the origin
of financial systems, is reframed here as the canonical form of reciprocity:
simultaneous, symmetric, and partner-contingent. Building on this logic, we
reconstruct four core financial functions-credit, insurance, token exchange,
and investment-as expressions of the same underlying principle under varying
conditions. By grounding financial behavior in minimal, simulateable dynamics
of reciprocal interaction, this framework shifts the focus from institutional
engineering to behavioral computation-offering a new foundation for modeling
decentralized financial behavior in both human and artificial agents. |