Trust the Name: Demonstrating Material Value Added by Management Using Intangible Flows MapssA Case from the Blockchain Smart Contracts Industry.

Abstract

We postulate that since in complex networks preferential attachment follows fitness, and fitness follows visibility, then the path to value is traceable even for intangible assets. We first focus on a complex economic system – the market for smart contract platforms - and then move to generalize the principle for intelligent systems that perceive and sense, learn and reason, and act – being those fully machine based, or hybrid human-machine. Specifically, we demonstrate how to find evidence for predictability on how the personal brand of a company CEO is tied to its performance; for this we use the time series-network duality (Visibility Graph), and we apply financial risk forecasting to further discriminate for randomness. The result is a heuristic to probe value created by management authority, but it is compatible with any other signals obtained by public opinion mining. Furthermore, this approach demonstrates how context awareness, in the form of semantic flux, can be used for detecting material value in intangible flows when signals are created and modified by intelligent agents (including those automated in distributed ledgers).