Preregistration: Paying for Your Own Demand? Circular AI Deals and Stock Prices

Preregistration (version 1.0, 2 November 2026) for the research paper "Paying for Your Own Demand? Circular AI Deals and Stock Prices". The study tests whether the stock market reacts differently to "circular" AI deals, in which a supplier also finances its customer (equity, warrants, loans, guarantees or residual-value support), than to ordinary AI supply deals of similar size; whether that difference changed after circular financing became a public concern in October 2025; and whether firms with more circular deals fell more in the October 2026 AI selloff and on days of negative AI-financing news. The document fixes the research questions, data sources, deal definitions, event-date rule, abnormal-return model, exclusions, primary and secondary hypotheses, multiple-testing correction, inference methods, robustness checks and interpretation rules before any stock price is downloaded. At the time of publication a first pass of the deal database had been built from news, press releases and SEC filings without any price data; no stock return had been computed. The main analysis will be run once, after the data freeze on 30 November 2026.