PRETIUM Market: The Economics of Cognitive Capacity

Abstract

Organizations that buy AI capacity now purchase across model APIs, hosted inference, rented and preemptible GPU capacity, tool and retrieval services, and private local execution — capacity classes whose native meters do not share a unit, whose prices do not encode eligibility, and whose failures do not respect budget lines. This paper proposes, and does not claim to have implemented, a distinct governed economic contract for that purchasing problem: PRETIUM, an economic layer that operates strictly inside an externally owned authority boundary. The proposal has four elements: normalization that permits bounded comparison of unlike capacity without asserting fungibility; protected internal reserves for verification, synthesis, recovery, and closeout obligations; commitments bound to an eligible set that economics cannot widen; and evidence-backed clearing over an explicit lifecycle whose arithmetic must balance. The paper states the strongest counter-thesis fairly: that existing budgeting, reservation, billing-export, and dispute mechanisms — FinOps plus escrow — may already preserve every decision-relevant economic fact at lower cost. The proposed contract is offered with precommitted loss conditions: it loses if it cannot change a bounded eligible-set decision, protect a completion obligation, expose a material uncertainty or failure state, preserve a reconciliation fact, or outperform a declared naive cheapest-eligible policy under a test fixed before evaluation. No novelty, adoption, demand, legal status, financial value, production behavior, or measured performance is claimed.