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Applied and bridge studies study record
Finance, money & marketsBenchmark Manipulation as Private Public Infrastructure Failure
STATUS · Manuscript in progressSSRN · Not yet posted
MECHANISM
Identify the incentive structure and the condition that would falsify the claim.
RULE CHANGE
Read the intervention only after the paper shows how the current payoff space fails to support system welfare.
READER USE
Use the summary to see where private gain creates system exposure, then check the study record.
Contribution — what this adds to the conversation
Contributes a formal impossibility theorem, welfare decomposition, and empirical calibration. Bridges finance, law, and mechanism design literatures.
WHAT'S NEW · Reframes benchmark manipulation as private public infrastructure failure, proves Benchmark Infrastructure Floor Theorem, and provides welfare-accounting decomposition. Original synthesis of existing empirical work within SAPM framework.
The paper reframes financial benchmark manipulation as a structural failure of private public infrastructure. It proves the Benchmark Infrastructure Floor Theorem: any benchmark regime with public reliance, private influence, conflict exposure, and record incompleteness has a strictly positive system-welfare floor. Monte Carlo simulation yields no canonical estimate is assigned: each dollar of private benchmark-linked payoff destroys $2.10 in system welfare. The paper covers LIBOR, FX fixes, ISDAFIX, and credit ratings, and proposes Decision Accounting as the missing reconstruction layer.