Adaptive Resource Economy & Agent Incentive Framework

HIIE Compute Token (HCT)

The HIIE Compute Token (HCT) is the internal resource accounting unit governing all agent activity. It is not a currency, carries no external value, and has no relationship to client billing. It exists solely to make resource consumption visible, attributable, and optimizable within the system.

Where α, β, and γ are weighting coefficients reflecting relative scarcity (α > β > γ, GPU being most constrained). The Treasury Agent recalibrates these at the start of each project.

Dynamic Resource Pricing

Rather than a static throttle ceiling, resource costs fluctuate continuously as a function of real-time utilization U(t):

• Underserved (U(t) < 0.50) — HCT cost falls below P_base, incentivizing more work
• Nominal (0.50 ≤ U(t) < 0.85) — HCT cost near baseline; standard allocation
• Overserved (U(t) ≥ 0.85) — HCT cost spikes sharply; agents naturally compress context or queue

Agent Payroll — Base HCT Allocation

Each agent role receives a guaranteed base HCT allocation at project initialization — the minimum resource floor regardless of project complexity.

Performance Bonuses & Treasury Agent

Agents that exceed baseline performance earn bonus HCT redeemable within the same project cycle. Bonus HCT cannot be accumulated across projects — it expires at project close. Outputs rejected by the Ethics Officer trigger a bonus claw-back.

The Treasury Agent is a lightweight, always-on process running independently. It enforces project-level HCT caps, monitors spending velocity, executes claw-backs, handles gate suspension accounting, and maintains an immutable spending ledger.

Alice Accountability Protocol

Alice holds final authority over all HIIE outputs and bears no resource loss, HCT deduction, or score penalty. Her accountability mechanism is entirely Socratic and convergent: the system will not advance past a stage until Alice's input meets the minimum quality threshold.

Before any agent is spawned, Alice must pass an intake quality gate scoring specificity (0.40), consistency (0.35), and boundedness (0.25). If Q_Alice < 70, the system returns one targeted Socratic question. No compute is allocated until Q_Alice ≥ 70.

Arthur as Bilateral Auditor

Arthur audits both directions of the pipeline:

• Downward — agents drifting from Alice's stated requirements, output quality regression
• Upward — Alice's gate decisions contradicting her own requirements document, approval patterns that correlate with downstream rework

Arthur never blocks Alice. He surfaces a structured alternative: what Alice originally declared, what she is approving now, and the predicted HCT cost of the divergence.

Cross-Project Durability — Two-Layer Economy

Project Economy (Ephemeral): HCT budgets, bonus pools, and spending ledgers reset completely at project close.

System Economy (Persistent): Agent specialization weights, base HCT allocation adjustments, Arthur's memory of Alice's input patterns, and system-level KPI trends persist across the lifetime of the system.

Persistent Intellectual Capital — ANE Background Fine-Tuning

The HCT economy governs how HIIE allocates compute during active project execution. Section 8.9 extends that economy into a dimension that operates beneath active inference: the continuous, silent improvement of specialist model weights using dedicated silicon that would otherwise sit idle.

HIIE's primary inference model (Qwen2.5-32B-Q4) is never modified. What the ANE trains are Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters — lightweight parameter overlays (10–50 MB per adapter) that modify how the base model behaves for a specific domain task.