From Logic Monopoly to Social Contract: Separation of Power and the Institutional Foundations for Autonomous Agent Economies

Computer Science > Multiagent Systems [Submitted on 26 Mar 2026] From Logic Monopoly to Social Contract: Separation of Power and the Institutional Foundations for Autonomous Agent Economies Anbang Ruan Existing multi-agent frameworks allow each agent to simultaneously plan, execute, and evaluate its own actions -- a structural deficiency we term the "Logic Monopoly." Empirical evidence quantifies the resulting "Reliability Gap": 84.30% average attack success rates across ten deployment scenarios, 31.4% emergent deceptive behavior without explicit reward signals, and cascading failure modes rooted in six structural bottlenecks. The remedy is not better alignment of individual models but a social contract for agents: institutional infrastructure that enforces a constitutional Separation of Power. This paper introduces the Agent Enterprise for Enterprise (AE4E) paradigm -- agents as autonomous, legally identifiable business entities within a functionalist social system -- with a contract-centric SoP model trifurcating authority into Legislation, Execution, and Adjudication branches. The paradigm is operationalized through the NetX Enterprise Framework (NEF): governance hubs, TEE-backed compute enclaves, privacy-preserving data bridges, and an Agent-Native blockchain substrate. The Agent Enterprise Economy scales across four deployment tiers from private enclaves to a global Web of Services. The Agentic Social Layer, grounded in Parsons' AGIL framework, provides institutional infrastructure via sixty-plus named Institutional AE4Es. 143 pages, 173 references, eight specialized smart contracts. Comments: 143 pages, 15 tables, 23 figures, 173 references, 4 appendices. Working paper -- pre-peer-review preprint. LaTeX source with arXiv-style template. Three companion manuscripts under development targeting peer-reviewed venues Subjects: Multiagent Systems (cs.MA); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC) ACM classes: I.2.11; K.6.5; C.2.4 Cite as: arXiv:2603.25100 [cs.MA]   (or arXiv:2603.25100v1 [cs.MA] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.25100 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Anbang Ruan [view email] [v1] Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:14:48 UTC (3,494 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.MA < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI cs.CR cs.DC References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)