Hover a cell to preview its name and verdict.
Companion to Entities — all 36 contract combinations mapped. Click any cell to pin details.
Every contract in capital markets is built from four primitives: pay basis (time, completion, or outcome), risk exposure (none, partial, or full), decision rights (policy-bounded or discretionary), and information rights (agent-controlled or system-controlled). Combining these gives 3 × 3 × 2 × 2 = 36 possible contracts. This grid maps all of them.
Most combinations don't hold together. Outcome pay with agent-controlled information is gameable — the agent shades the metrics. Discretion without risk exposure invites moral hazard. These tensions push unstable contracts toward one of the few bundles whose primitives reinforce each other. Each cell shows what happens to a given combination: whether it holds, why it fails, and where it drifts when it does.
Under the current regime — where agents control what principals can see — only four bundles are stable. When information control transfers to a system, three more become viable. The entities essay develops the full argument for why these are the only attractors.