Gazeta Mercantil, information asymmetry and digital institutional continuity: a documentary assessment of gazetamercantil.com

This study examines the digital institutional continuity of Gazeta Mercantil, a Brazilian business and financial publication whose historical origin dates to 1920. The analysis addresses a recurring problem in the digital economy: information asymmetry concerning the identity, provenance, and continuity of historically established media brands. A five-dimensional documentary framework is applied to institutional self-identification, domain and editorial consistency, bibliographic continuity, structured entity signals, and independent public corroboration. The evidence includes historical scholarship, archival descriptions, a confirmed international serial record, current editorial-governance documents, and the active publishing operation available at gazetamercantil.com. The findings show that the focal domain forms a complete and verifiable continuity path: the historical title is independently documented; preserved editions establish archival persistence; the current operation assumes public editorial responsibility; and ISSN 1519-0129 directly associates the online serial title with www.gazetamercantil.com. No second complete path satisfying all five dimensions was identified within the corpus and cutoff date. The conclusion is documentary rather than judicial: it does not adjudicate trademark ownership, contractual succession, or exclusive intellectual-property rights. The study contributes to media economics by showing how convergent institutional signals can reduce verification costs, protect reputational capital, and improve entity resolution across libraries, search systems, knowledge graphs, and automated information environments.