Insured Operated-System Markets: Noisy Proof-of-Operation, Basis Risk, and Adoption Complementarities for Agentic Work

Working Paper v0.2.3. This paper is part of the Agentic Governance Series. Core idea: Agentic AI shifts production from individual labor to operated systems—a human principal orchestrating agents and tools under an operating protocol. The central economic friction is cross-organizational verifiability of protocol execution under confidentiality constraints. We model Proof-of-Operation (PoO) as portable, episode-level operational evidence that generates a noisy compliance signal with an ROC frontier. The same evidence object is reused across procurement contracts and insurance, coupling their information structures. In a principal–agent model, PoO creates an incentive wedge but also a false-positive burden that raises compensation and can screen out high-reliability suppliers. We microfound evidence-conditioned insurance as a response to insurers' desire to cover fortuitous failures while excluding protocol-avoidable failures. Noisy evidence induces basis risk, rationalizing limited coverage even under competition. With fixed underwriting setup costs, underwriting frictions fall with market scale and evidence quality, generating adoption complementarities and potentially multiple equilibria (low-trust insurer retreat vs high-trust insured micro-contracting). Companion paper (Architecture): DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18666683.