{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp05_complete_proposal_portfolio20_20260803","cell_id":"deadweight_loss_reduction__material_culture_museum_studies","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"dwl-museum-conditional-loan-slot-recycling","proposal_index":1,"version":0,"title":"Conditional Recycling of Encumbered Museum Loan Slots","problem":"A museum protects objects and limited conservation and registrar capacity by imposing an annual cap on outgoing loans. Slots are assigned early and remain attached to approved borrowers even when their exhibitions are postponed, required milestones are missed, or the loan becomes unlikely to proceed. Because the cap and its assignment rule are bundled together, feasible later requests can be rejected while reserved handling capacity and eligible objects remain unused. The cap may be justified; the avoidable wedge is the non-releasable allocation.","actors":["Museum collections committee","Conservators and registrars","Curators and collections managers","Approved borrowing institutions","Later applicants and waitlisted borrowing institutions","Source communities, rights holders, and cultural authorities connected to requested objects","Researchers and exhibition visitors","Museum governing body"],"observable_state":"For a defined loan year, records show which quota slots were reserved, which borrowers met preparation milestones, which loans were cancelled or postponed, when released capacity became known, which later requests were declined because the quota was recorded as full, and whether any declined request concerned an object that could have passed the unchanged conservation, legal, provenance, consent, security, insurance, and staffing checks.","consequence":"An eligible object can remain in storage and planned conservation or registrar capacity can go unused while another institution loses a time-bounded opportunity to exhibit or study it. Borrowers, audiences, and the lending museum forgo potential access and mission value without a corresponding increase in object protection; however, reallocating slots carelessly could shift access toward well-resourced applicants or compress safety review.","affected_objective":"Increase completed, safe, legitimate public and scholarly use of collections within the existing outgoing-loan cap while preserving object care, source-community authority, legal compliance, staff workload limits, and fair access.","intervention":"Pilot a conditional loan-slot allocation rule for one loan cycle and one predeclared class of physically robust, recently assessed objects. Keep the annual cap and every substantive conservation, provenance, consent, legal, security, insurance, and staffing check unchanged. At approval, publish preparation milestones and a reconfirmation date. A slot whose borrower withdraws or misses a milestone is reviewed before release; if the delay cannot be cured without displacing protected checks, the collections committee may return the slot to a transparent waitlist. A substitute request must fit the available capacity window, pass the full checks, and be selected through a published rubric that considers readiness, object compatibility, public or scholarly purpose, prior access, and burdens on smaller institutions. No applicant pays for priority. Record affected-party effects and stop or revise the pilot if safety, legitimacy, workload, or distributional triggers are crossed.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Distortion Map","domain_realization":"The protective quantity cap is separated from the nontransferable, first-assigned reservation rule that can leave cancelled or stalled loans encumbering scarce slots."},{"archetype_element":"Protected Constraint Safeguard","domain_realization":"The loan cap and all object-safety, provenance, consent, legal, security, insurance, and staff-capacity reviews remain binding; only the assignment of unused capacity is tested."},{"archetype_element":"Surplus Estimate","domain_realization":"The inquiry counts potentially recoverable completed loans, access opportunities, avoided idle preparation windows, and administrative burdens without assigning unsupported monetary values or treating every rejected request as feasible."},{"archetype_element":"Affected-Party Incidence Map","domain_realization":"The review distinguishes gains and burdens for original borrowers, substitute borrowers, staff, audiences, source communities, rights holders, and institutions with fewer application resources."},{"archetype_element":"Redesign Lever","domain_realization":"Milestone-based release and governed reallocation replace indefinite encumbrance while leaving the total quota unchanged."},{"archetype_element":"Behavioral Response Model","domain_realization":"Monitoring tests whether borrowers reserve speculatively, milestones induce premature preparation, applicants game readiness claims, staff face compressed reviews, or repeated reallocations favor well-resourced institutions."},{"archetype_element":"Implementation Boundary","domain_realization":"The pilot covers one loan cycle and a predefined low-handling-risk object class, with no relaxation of substantive approvals."},{"archetype_element":"Rollback or Adjustment Rule","domain_realization":"The museum returns to the existing assignment rule for uncommitted slots if protected-purpose or equity triggers fire, while honoring already executed loan agreements unless a normal safety clause requires otherwise."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"distortion_reduction_review","role":"Separates loss caused by the annual cap from loss caused by keeping nonviable reservations attached to that cap, and tests whether any apparently blocked loan was actually compatible with the protected checks.","counterfactual_removal":"Without this review, cancelled or delayed activity could be mislabeled as recoverable loss, and the pilot might attack a genuinely necessary capacity or safety limit."},{"mechanism_slug":"quota_or_allocation_rule_review","role":"Provides the core redesign: preserve the legitimate loan ceiling but condition assignments on milestones and permit authorized reallocation of released slots.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, the proposal would either leave the stale assignment rule intact or drift toward raising the cap without evidence that more safe capacity exists."},{"mechanism_slug":"impact_assessment_table","role":"Records each affected party's expected and observed gain, burden, protected interest, uncertainty, and monitoring trigger before the committee decides whether to reallocate a slot.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the table, additional completed loans could conceal concentrated staff burdens, displaced access, or harms to source communities and smaller borrowers."},{"mechanism_slug":"cost_benefit_assessment_protocol","role":"Compares recovered access and usable capacity with added administration, transition burdens, compressed review risk, and distributional effects under alternative assumptions.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the protocol, a higher count of completed loans could be accepted as sufficient even if it merely relocates costs or weakens protected outcomes."},{"mechanism_slug":"regulatory_simplification_pilot","role":"Bounds the altered allocation rule to a reversible object class and loan cycle, instruments protected outcomes, and requires an explicit continuation decision.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a bounded pilot, the museum would have to choose between retaining the rule and making an institution-wide change before observing behavioral and safety responses."}],"causal_chain":["The museum fixes a legitimate annual ceiling for outgoing loans because conservation, registrar, and oversight capacity is limited.","The existing assignment rule treats an early approval as occupying a slot even after evidence suggests that the planned loan will not proceed on schedule.","Later compatible requests cannot access the encumbered slot, although the cap's protective purpose would still be satisfied if the unused assignment were released and fully reviewed.","Milestones and reconfirmation make nonviable reservations observable early enough for an authorized decision.","The collections committee releases only those reservations that fail the stated conditions and offers them through a transparent waitlist.","Substitute requests undergo every unchanged substantive check and must fit the available object and staff-capacity window.","If compatible substitutes complete safely, previously idle capacity produces additional legitimate collection use without increasing the cap.","Incidence, workload, safety, consent, gaming, and access measures determine whether the rule is retained, adjusted, or rolled back."],"baseline":"The annual outgoing-loan quota is allocated through ordinary approval order or planning commitments. Once a request occupies a slot, cancellation, postponement, or missed preparation milestones do not reliably trigger timely release and governed reassignment. Later applicants may be rejected when the ledger is full, and any recovery depends on ad hoc staff intervention.","nearest_rivals":["Add conservation and registrar staff or raise the annual loan cap: this addresses genuine undersupply, whereas the proposal tests whether existing capacity is stranded by the assignment rule.","Use a conventional cancellation waitlist: this is simpler, but it may omit object compatibility, source-community authority, staff-window constraints, and distributional review.","Accelerate every loan approval: this targets procedural delay, but it does not release capacity held by stalled reservations and could compress substantive checks.","Offer digital surrogates instead of physical loans: this may expand some access, but it does not repair allocation of the protected physical-loan capacity.","Negotiate replacements case by case: this preserves discretion but leaves release criteria opaque and may advantage applicants with stronger institutional relationships."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The proposal is specifically warranted only if the binding loss comes from a stale, non-releasable assignment inside a justified quantity cap. If the dominant cause is insufficient conservation capacity, slow substantive review, lack of compatible applicants, or ordinary search and negotiation costs, a supply, streamlining, matching, or transaction-cost intervention is the better explanation.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The museum governing body retains authority over loan policy and delegates individual pilot releases and reallocations to the collections committee, subject to conservator, registrar, legal, provenance, and required source-community or rights-holder approvals. The pilot creates no authority to override those approvals.","authorized_first_step":"Authorize a retrospective records audit and a paper simulation of the conditional-release rule; no live slot may be released until the governing body approves the bounded pilot and its triggers.","excluded_actions":["Increasing the annual outgoing-loan cap","Waiving or shortening substantive conservation, provenance, consent, legal, security, insurance, or rights reviews","Treating silence from a source community or rights holder as consent","Charging applicants for priority or auctioning access","Reallocating a slot without notice and an opportunity for the original borrower to document a curable delay","Applying the pilot to sacred, culturally restricted, unusually fragile, legally disputed, or otherwise designated high-risk objects","Changing ownership, custody rights, accession status, or repatriation processes","Penalizing staff for invoking a protected-purpose halt"],"halt_rollback":"Pause new reallocations if an adverse object event, consent or rights breach, material staff overload, rushed-review indicator, repeated speculative booking, or material access disparity linked to the pilot appears. Uncommitted slots revert to the baseline rule while the collections committee reviews the trigger. Existing executed agreements remain governed by their normal safety and termination clauses; pilot continuation requires an affirmative governing-body decision."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"A record review shows that apparently unused slots reflect necessary conservation contingencies, unresolved consent or legal issues, staff shortages, or the absence of any later request compatible with the same object-risk and timing window; alternatively, releasing reservations would merely move congestion into protected review stages.","problem_falsifier":"The inferred problem is falsified if no declined later request could have satisfied the unchanged checks within a slot that became genuinely releasable, or if the quota was not binding when those requests were declined.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is falsified if, under a predeclared pilot comparison, conditional release does not convert releasable slots into safely completed loans or materially earlier legitimate access, or if it causes protected-outcome breaches, unacceptable workload compression, systematic gaming, or an access shift that the rubric and compensating adjustments cannot correct.","risks":["Original borrowers may lose viable loans because milestones are insensitive to external delays.","Applicants may reserve speculatively or overstate readiness.","Rapid substitution may compress conservation, provenance, consent, legal, security, or insurance work.","A readiness criterion may favor large, well-resourced borrowing institutions.","Staff may carry additional tracking and adjudication work that exceeds recovered value.","Source-community or rights-holder interests may be reduced to schedule variables rather than independent authority.","Object-specific compatibility may make nominal slots non-interchangeable.","A higher completion count may obscure lower interpretive quality or public value.","Pilot cases may be too low-risk to support decisions about the wider collection."]},"next_evidence_step":"Audit one completed loan cycle, bounded to one collection unit, and construct a de-identified event ledger for every quota slot: reservation date, required milestones, milestone completion, cancellation or postponement date, staff window, object-risk classification, protected approvals, declined later requests, and final outcome. Have conservation, registration, curatorial, access, and source-community liaison representatives independently classify which slots were genuinely releasable and which later requests were compatible. Then run a paper counterfactual using the proposed rule and report disagreements, missing data, affected-party incidence, and safety or equity triggers; do not implement live reallocation at this stage.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Not assessed against prior proposals; this is proposal 1 for the cell, and no prior experiment candidate was consulted.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":[],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}