How many milestones does an unenforced job need?

What it found

A requester and an anonymous worker split a job into milestones, each a stage of pre-payment, work and late payment, with a grim trigger that forfeits the remaining surplus and a relationship value W. A milestone is self-enforcing under some pre-payment split iff its cost is at most the pooled continuation value, so pay-after-delivery needs P/W_r equal milestones, pay-before C/W_w, and the best split C/(W_r+W_w) (110, 25 and 20 in the example), whoever holds the value. Because early defection also forfeits the remaining work, the largest milestone shrinks geometrically and the minimum count is ⌈ln(1+(V−C)/W)/ln(V/C)⌉: 17 instead of 100 at C=100, V=120, W=1, with the first milestone 1−(C−W)/V of the job. Cheap re-entry caps W and costs ln(1/e) milestones. Matched on 2000 random instances. Stylised: complete information, pro-rata value.

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Paper, code and results

• README and method
• White paper
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More in Verification games & slashing

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Other research topics

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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.