{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp04_retrieval_first_paired20_20260802","cell_id":"deadweight_loss_reduction__linguistics_semiotics","arm":"PROPOSAL_FIRST","candidate_id":"pf_dwl_ls_001","hypothesis_id":null,"version":0,"title":"Reclaimable Consultation Slots for Community Language Documentation","problem":"A community-governed language-documentation center assigns limited paid consultation hours with fluent speakers to research projects in fixed, nontransferable blocks. The rule protects speakers from overbooking and gives projects predictable, fair access, but a project that cannot use a reserved slot cannot return it for another already approved project. Consequently, an available and consenting speaker can have an idle paid-consultation period while compatible, ethically approved requests remain queued.","actors":["Fluent speakers and language consultants","Community language council or speaker council","Documentation-center scheduling staff","Researchers and community documentation teams with approved projects","Community members whose language materials and priorities are represented","Research ethics and data-governance reviewers"],"observable_state":"Scheduling records show periods that were reserved but unused or cancelled, alongside requests waiting for the same consultant or an approved compatible consultant; the waiting request, consultant availability, consent, project approval, and data-access permissions overlap, but reassignment is prohibited by the nontransferability rule.","consequence":"Feasible, mutually agreed, compensated consultation work is foregone; consultants lose optional paid work, approved teams wait or substitute lower-quality elicitation and verification methods, and time-sensitive language documentation is delayed without an offsetting gain to the rule's protective purpose.","affected_objective":"Timely completion of ethically authorized language documentation while preserving consultant autonomy, workload limits, fair project access, compensation, community priorities, and data sovereignty.","intervention":"Pilot a reclaimable consultation-slot pool at one center. Each project keeps a protected minimum allocation, but may release an unusable slot before a defined cutoff. Scheduling staff may reassign it only to a waitlisted request that is already ethics-approved, data-authorized, compatible with the consultant's linguistic expertise, and affirmatively accepted by the consultant. Weekly workload caps, unchanged compensation, project-level concentration limits, an audit log, and automatic pilot expiry preserve the original protections.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Value-blocking wedge","domain_realization":"The fixed nontransferability rule prevents an otherwise feasible consultation from using a released reservation."},{"archetype_element":"Blocked beneficial activity","domain_realization":"A consenting consultant and an approved documentation team cannot conduct a paid session even when their availability and permissions align."},{"archetype_element":"Idle capacity and queued demand","domain_realization":"Cancelled or unused consultation periods coexist with compatible approved requests waiting for hours."},{"archetype_element":"Protected purpose","domain_realization":"Predictable access, equitable allocation, consultant workload protection, informed consent, community priority, and data sovereignty."},{"archetype_element":"Redesign lever","domain_realization":"Make only voluntarily released slots reclaimable through a bounded, eligibility-gated waitlist while retaining protected minimum allocations."},{"archetype_element":"Affected-party incidence","domain_realization":"Consultants may gain optional paid sessions but face fatigue risk; waiting projects may gain access; original assignees retain minimum access; smaller or less connected projects could lose unless concentration limits are enforced."},{"archetype_element":"Monitoring and rollback","domain_realization":"Track completed reassignments, unused hours, waiting time, allocation concentration, refusals, workload-cap events, complaints, and permission incidents; automatically revert after the pilot unless jointly renewed."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"distortion_reduction_review","role":"Separate sessions stranded solely by nontransferability from sessions unusable because of scarcity, incompatibility, consent, ethics, or data-governance constraints; estimate recoverable consultation-hours under explicit assumptions.","counterfactual_removal":"Without this review, ordinary cancellations or genuinely unusable hours could be mislabeled as avoidable loss, encouraging removal of legitimate protections."},{"mechanism_slug":"quota_or_allocation_rule_review","role":"Keep the center's overall workload cap and protected project minimums while testing whether voluntarily released slots can be reassigned through a legitimate rule.","counterfactual_removal":"Without allocation-rule review, the proposal could drift into increasing the cap, overriding existing entitlements, or treating scarce speaker time as unrestricted capacity."},{"mechanism_slug":"impact_assessment_table","role":"Record anticipated and observed effects for consultants, original assignees, waitlisted teams, community priorities, and governance reviewers, with a safeguard and trigger for each group.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the incidence register, aggregate utilization could improve while fatigue, unequal access, or concentrated gains remain hidden."},{"mechanism_slug":"regulatory_simplification_pilot","role":"Confine the reclaimable-pool rule to one center, a short period, approved request classes, workload caps, and an automatic expiry.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a bounded pilot, an uncertain scheduling redesign would become a system-wide or persistent change before its effects on consent, fairness, and quality were observed."},{"mechanism_slug":"cost_benefit_assessment_protocol","role":"Compare recovered consultation-hours and reduced delay with scheduling work, transition costs, distributional effects, quality risks, and protected-purpose outcomes; stress-test assumptions about which released slots were truly usable.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a two-sided and sensitivity-tested assessment, lower idle time alone could be treated as proof of improvement."}],"causal_chain":["Projects receive fixed, nontransferable consultation blocks to protect access and consultant workload.","A project releases or fails to use a reserved period while an approved compatible request is waiting.","The allocation rule prohibits reassignment even when the consultant is available and affirmatively consents.","The period remains idle and the waiting request remains delayed, destroying feasible value without advancing the rule's protection in that instance.","A reclaimable pool permits only voluntarily released periods to flow to eligible waitlisted requests while retaining caps, consent, minimum allocations, and permissions.","If the wedge is causal, more eligible released periods become completed consultations without worsening protected-purpose indicators.","Monitoring detects fatigue, concentration, gaming, quality loss, or governance breaches and triggers adjustment or reversion."],"baseline":"The ordinary baseline is fixed project-by-project allocation: reserved blocks cannot be transferred, unused periods expire, waiting requests remain in their original order, and staff lack authority to refill a cancellation even when all substantive approvals and consultant consent are present.","nearest_rivals":["Matching Improvement Program: the apparent loss may result from dialect, expertise, timing, or permission incompatibility rather than the allocation rule; better compatibility information would then be the primary intervention.","Transaction Cost Reduction: administrative effort required to confirm consent and permissions may make reassignment impractical even if the rule changes.","Capacity expansion: if almost every usable consultant period is already filled, the binding problem is raw scarcity rather than stranded allocation."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"After excluding raw scarcity, incompatibility, missing consent, approval gaps, and verification costs, a nontransferable allocation rule still strands periods for which an eligible request and willing consultant are simultaneously available; repairing that specific rule, not merely improving search or adding capacity, is therefore the candidate causal lever.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The center's scheduling committee may alter scheduling procedures only with joint approval from the community or speaker council and the body responsible for research ethics and data governance; individual consultants retain final authority over every session.","authorized_first_step":"Conduct a de-identified retrospective shadow review of one center's most recent 12 weeks of scheduling records to count released periods that could have been reassigned under the proposed consent, compatibility, workload, ethics, and data-permission gates. This step changes no allocation.","excluded_actions":["Overriding or presuming consultant consent","Increasing consultant workload caps","Reducing compensation or treating released time as unpaid availability","Reallocating a project's protected minimum hours","Assigning consultants outside their self-declared linguistic expertise or community role","Using language data beyond existing ethics, access, or sovereignty permissions","Changing the center-wide capacity cap","Making the pilot permanent without joint review"],"halt_rollback":"Any later pilot automatically expires at its stated end date. Pause new reassignments immediately upon a consent or data-permission breach, repeated workload-cap pressure, a predefined rise in complaints, or allocation concentration beyond the approved limit; honor already completed compensation and revert future periods to the fixed-allocation baseline while the joint authorities review the event."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"Most nominally unused periods prove unusable because consultants were unavailable, declined, lacked the required dialect or task expertise, or could not lawfully access the project's data; the apparent coexistence of idle capacity and waiting demand would then be only a calendar artifact.","problem_falsifier":"The retrospective review finds no periods in which a released reservation, an eligible approved request, consultant availability and consent, workload headroom, and compatible permissions overlapped while nontransferability alone blocked reassignment.","intervention_falsifier":"In a separately authorized pilot, the reclaimable pool does not increase completed eligible consultations or reduce avoidable waiting relative to comparable baseline periods, or it produces unacceptable consent incidents, fatigue, quality degradation, allocation concentration, administrative burden, or community-priority displacement.","risks":["Researchers may strategically hoard slots until the release cutoff.","Well-resourced teams may monitor and capture released periods more effectively than smaller community projects.","Consultants may experience subtle pressure to accept reassigned work despite formal opt-in language.","Utilization targets may crowd out reflection, preparation, or culturally required pacing.","Compatibility labels may flatten dialect, identity, or community-role distinctions.","Additional scheduling work may exceed the value of recovered sessions.","A successful pilot in easy cases may not generalize to sensitive or complex documentation work."]},"next_evidence_step":"Using only existing de-identified records from one center and a fixed 12-week window, construct a row-level shadow table of every unused or cancelled reserved period and every contemporaneous waiting request. Apply the proposed eligibility gates without contacting participants or changing schedules, then report: the number of periods blocked solely by nontransferability; reasons other periods were unusable; which actors would have gained or faced exposure; and sensitivity to release-cutoff, workload-cap, protected-minimum, and concentration-limit assumptions. Proceed to an opt-in pilot only if the joint authorities separately approve it.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Initial complete proposal","Concrete domain problem","Archetype-preserving causal structure","Protected-purpose and incidence safeguards","Bounded falsifiable evidence step"],"conceptual_changes":["Initial formulation of nontransferable language-consultation allocations as the candidate avoidable wedge.","Separated allocation distortion from consultant scarcity, compatibility matching, and administrative transaction costs."],"operational_changes":["Specified a reclaimable-slot pool with protected minimums, opt-in consent, eligibility gates, workload caps, concentration limits, audit logging, and automatic expiry."],"evidence_changes":["Defined a de-identified 12-week retrospective shadow review as the first evidence step.","Specified problem and intervention falsifiers plus protected-purpose monitoring signals."],"claim_changes":["Prior art remains unsearched.","No claim is made about novelty, prevalence, demand, effect size, or net benefit."]}}