{"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-access-balanced-timed-admission","proposal_index":2,"version":0,"title":"Access-Protected Peak and Off-Peak Admission Pricing","problem":"A museum with a fixed safe occupancy limit charges the same administered admission price for every timed-entry slot in a temporary exhibition. Peak slots sell out or develop queues while some off-peak slots remain available. Visitors with scheduling flexibility receive no price reason to move, visitors constrained to peak periods compete for the same capacity, and unused off-peak capacity cannot substitute for congested peak access. The safety cap is legitimate; the potentially avoidable wedge is a flat price across materially different levels of time-specific scarcity.","actors":["Prospective exhibition visitors with flexible schedules","Prospective visitors constrained by work, school, caregiving, disability, or transport schedules","Low-income visitors and participants in free-admission programs","School and community groups","Museum visitor-services and ticketing staff","Curators and exhibition staff","Security, facilities, and emergency-planning staff","Museum finance and access-program staff","Museum governing body"],"observable_state":"For each timed-entry period in one exhibition, the museum can observe the posted price, safe capacity, reservations, completed entries, cancellations, no-shows, sellout timing, queue or turn-away counts, visitor category where lawfully and voluntarily recorded, use of access programs, and nearby off-peak slots that finished with unused capacity. The diagnostic also records whether congestion reflects the exhibition's entire operating period being full rather than a timing mismatch.","consequence":"Visitors unable to attend off-peak may be rationed by sellouts or waiting while otherwise usable exhibition capacity expires at other times. Flexible visitors receive no incentive to shift, and the museum may forgo access opportunities without gaining additional safety. A poorly designed price response could instead ration culturally valuable access by income, burden schedule-constrained visitors, or undermine the museum's public mission.","affected_objective":"Distribute attendance more evenly across existing safe exhibition capacity while preserving affordability, disability access, school and community access, predictable free-entry opportunities, visitor safety, and the museum's public-service obligations.","intervention":"Run a bounded, revenue-neutral pilot in one temporary exhibition that replaces the single admission price with a prepublished schedule of modest peak supplements and off-peak discounts tied to forecast and observed slot occupancy. Apply hard price floors and ceilings, prohibit personalized pricing, and do not raise the safe occupancy cap. Before general sale, reserve a fixed access allotment in every peak period for existing free-admission programs, disability-related scheduling needs, school or community groups, and visitors receiving income-based credits. Allow unused protected allotments to return to general inventory only after a stated release time. Publish the full schedule and eligibility rules in advance, offer fee-free exchanges into cheaper slots, and use any net pilot revenue above the predeclared baseline to fund access credits or visitor assistance. Monitor whether attendance shifts into slack periods without increasing exclusion, queues, staff burden, or unsafe crowding.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Distortion Map","domain_realization":"The museum's fixed safe capacity is separated from the flat administered price that treats congested and slack time slots as equivalent and thereby rations peak access through sellouts and waiting."},{"archetype_element":"Price-Wedge Diagnostic","domain_realization":"Slot-level data test whether identical prices coexist with repeatable peak congestion and nearby unused capacity, and whether visitors have feasible opportunities to retime attendance."},{"archetype_element":"Protected Constraint Safeguard","domain_realization":"Safe occupancy remains unchanged, and per-slot access allotments, credits, price caps, and accommodations protect affordability and schedule-constrained participation."},{"archetype_element":"Surplus Estimate","domain_realization":"The assessment counts shifted attendance, additional use of previously empty slots, reduced waiting or turn-aways, visitor price burdens, and administrative costs while treating cultural and access values as explicit but uncertain rather than forcing unsupported monetary values."},{"archetype_element":"Affected-Party Incidence Map","domain_realization":"Effects are separated for flexible visitors, schedule-constrained visitors, low-income visitors, access-program participants, groups, staff, and the museum rather than inferred from total ticket receipts."},{"archetype_element":"Redesign Lever","domain_realization":"A bounded difference between peak and off-peak admission prices supplies a timing signal, paired with protected inventory and credits rather than unrestricted willingness-to-pay allocation."},{"archetype_element":"Behavioral Response Model","domain_realization":"The pilot tests retiming, abandonment, resale, category gaming, displacement into adjacent slots, new demand induced by discounts, and changes in no-shows or queue formation."},{"archetype_element":"Implementation Boundary","domain_realization":"The schedule applies to one exhibition for a specified booking window, within preapproved price limits and without changing permanent-collection admission or occupancy rules."},{"archetype_element":"Monitoring and Rebound Check","domain_realization":"Slot utilization, queues, access-program use, complaints, staff workload, crowding, and distribution across visitor categories are reviewed during the pilot."},{"archetype_element":"Rollback or Adjustment Rule","domain_realization":"The museum can narrow the price spread, add protected inventory, suspend peak supplements, or return to the flat price when safety or access triggers are crossed."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"distortion_reduction_review","role":"Determines whether the recoverable loss is a timing-allocation wedge created by flat pricing rather than unavoidable scarcity, lack of demand, or the legitimate occupancy ceiling.","counterfactual_removal":"Without this diagnostic, the museum might impose variable prices on an exhibition that is full at all times or misclassify necessary safety rationing as avoidable loss."},{"mechanism_slug":"congestion_or_capacity_pricing_adjustment","role":"Provides the core causal lever: raise the relative price of contended periods and lower it during slack periods so visitors who can retime have a reason to do so.","counterfactual_removal":"Without scarcity-linked price differences, the intervention supplies no direct incentive for flexible visitors to leave peak capacity available or use underfilled periods."},{"mechanism_slug":"price_control_redesign","role":"Separates the allocative function of the administered admission price from its affordability function, replacing blanket flatness with targeted credits, protected inventory, and bounded prices.","counterfactual_removal":"Without compensating protections, peak pricing could reduce queues by excluding visitors based on income rather than by shifting flexible attendance."},{"mechanism_slug":"impact_assessment_table","role":"Places each visitor and staff group's price change, access change, protected interest, uncertainty, and monitoring trigger in a common review artifact.","counterfactual_removal":"Without an incidence register, smoother aggregate attendance or higher receipts could conceal concentrated losses among schedule-constrained or low-income visitors."},{"mechanism_slug":"cost_benefit_assessment_protocol","role":"Compares recovered off-peak use and reduced waiting with visitor burdens, access-credit costs, administration, staffing changes, and contested public-mission effects under multiple assumptions.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a two-sided and sensitivity-tested assessment, ticket revenue or average utilization could be mistaken for net public value."},{"mechanism_slug":"regulatory_simplification_pilot","role":"Bounds the pricing change to one exhibition and booking period, instruments protected outcomes, and requires an affirmative decision before continuation.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a reversible pilot, the museum would commit its broader admission policy before observing retiming, exclusion, gaming, and workload responses."}],"causal_chain":["A temporary exhibition has a legitimate, fixed short-run occupancy ceiling.","A uniform admission price applies to both highly contended and underfilled timed-entry periods.","Flexible visitors face no monetary reason to choose slack periods, so demand remains concentrated at preferred times.","Peak capacity is rationed through early sellouts, queues, or turn-aways while some off-peak capacity expires unused.","A prepublished peak supplement and off-peak discount create a bounded timing signal.","Protected peak allotments and access credits prevent price from becoming the sole allocation criterion.","Some visitors who can retime choose cheaper periods, making peak inventory available to visitors whose schedules are less flexible.","More even attendance can convert otherwise unused slots into legitimate museum access without increasing the safety cap.","Monitoring reveals whether the recovered access exceeds administrative and distributional costs or whether exclusion, rebound congestion, or gaming requires adjustment or rollback."],"baseline":"The exhibition uses one general admission price across timed-entry periods, subject to existing free or discounted programs. Safe capacity is enforced separately for each slot. Excess peak demand is handled through sellouts, queues, or first-come booking, while off-peak availability is addressed through general promotion or remains unused.","nearest_rivals":["Expand opening hours, gallery space, or staffing: this addresses genuine capacity shortage, whereas the proposal reallocates use across already available periods.","Use a lottery or first-come reservation queue: these can allocate peak scarcity without income-based sorting but do not directly encourage flexible visitors to use slack periods.","Market off-peak periods more heavily: information may help visitors retime, but it does not repair the flat price wedge if preferences remain concentrated after schedules are visible.","Require no-show deposits or stricter cancellation rules: these target reservation reliability rather than the mismatch between peak congestion and off-peak capacity.","Create members-only or donor-priority periods: this may redistribute access but risks privileging institutional status and does not necessarily fill slack periods.","Apply unrestricted dynamic pricing: it offers a stronger scarcity signal but lacks the price bounds, protected inventory, credits, and public-mission safeguards required here."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"This proposal is appropriate only if the binding loss is time-specific congestion alongside substitutable slack capacity and if a bounded price difference can induce retiming. If all periods are full, visitors cannot reasonably shift, congestion is caused by slow entry processing, or price sensitivity primarily excludes rather than retimes visitors, the problem is capacity, transaction friction, or access allocation rather than a removable flat-price wedge.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The museum governing body approves admission policy, price bounds, revenue-neutrality rules, protected allotments, and halt thresholds. Visitor-services and finance staff may administer the published schedule within those bounds, while security and facilities staff retain independent authority over safe occupancy and emergency restrictions.","authorized_first_step":"Authorize a retrospective slot-level diagnostic and paper simulation using one completed exhibition period; no admission price or access entitlement changes at this stage.","excluded_actions":["Increasing or overriding the safe occupancy ceiling","Using individualized, opaque, or surveillance-derived prices","Auctioning protected-access slots","Reducing legally or institutionally required disability accommodations","Eliminating existing free-admission eligibility during the pilot","Charging peak supplements without simultaneously activating the approved protected inventory and access credits","Using protected characteristics to set individual prices","Treating willingness to pay as the sole measure of cultural or public value","Applying the pilot to permanent-collection admission or other exhibitions without separate approval","Retaining excess pilot revenue outside the predeclared access or revenue-neutrality rule"],"halt_rollback":"Suspend new peak supplements and return unsold future inventory to the baseline price if safe-crowding indicators worsen, protected peak allotments fail operationally, access-credit redemption is blocked, eligible visitor categories show a predeclared material loss of access, complaints reveal inaccessible exchange procedures, or ticket resale and category gaming cannot be controlled. Honor already purchased tickets at the lower of the pilot and rollback prices, preserve all accommodations, and require governing-body review before resumption."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"Peak and off-peak slots are not reasonable substitutes for visitors; the exhibition is effectively full throughout its run; observed off-peak vacancies arise from cancellations too late to resell; or protected access cannot be maintained without recreating the same congestion or imposing unacceptable administrative burdens.","problem_falsifier":"The inferred problem is falsified if slot-level records do not show simultaneous peak rationing and usable nearby slack under the flat price, or if visitors facing peak unavailability generally lack feasible off-peak alternatives.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is falsified if a bounded pilot or credible paper simulation shows that differentiated prices primarily reduce attendance among schedule-constrained or low-income visitors rather than shift flexible attendance, fail to increase use of slack periods or relieve peak rationing, or create unacceptable access, safety, gaming, or administrative harms that safeguards cannot correct.","risks":["Peak supplements may ration culturally valuable access by income.","Work, school, caregiving, disability, and transport constraints may prevent visitors from choosing discounted periods.","Visitors may perceive public heritage access as unfairly commercialized.","Protected allotments may be difficult to discover or redeem.","Applicants may misstate eligibility, and resale may undermine price bounds.","Discounts may create new congestion in formerly slack periods.","Demand forecasts may produce unnecessary price changes or unstable schedules.","Visitor-services staff may face additional explanation, refund, exchange, and conflict-resolution work.","Revenue-neutrality may fail if access-credit take-up differs from forecasts.","Aggregate attendance measures may hide reduced access for particular communities.","A temporary exhibition may not provide evidence transferable to other museum programs."]},"next_evidence_step":"For one completed temporary exhibition, assemble a bounded dataset covering six consecutive operating weeks: safe capacity, posted price, reservations, entries, cancellations, no-shows, sellout timing, queues or turn-aways, access-program use where lawfully recorded, and unsold inventory for each slot. Identify pairs of peak and nearby off-peak periods that offered the same exhibition experience. Conduct a paper simulation across several capped peak-off-peak price spreads, protected-allotment sizes, and access-credit assumptions. Report which attendance shifts are assumed rather than observed, the distribution of price changes across visitor categories, administrative requirements, revenue balance, and conditions under which the pricing case reverses. Do not change live prices during this evidence step.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Proposal 1 addressed outgoing object-loan capacity allocated among borrowing institutions: a non-releasable quota assignment stranded conservation and registrar slots, and the intervention used milestones, release, and waitlist reallocation while preserving the loan cap. This proposal addresses visitor attendance across exhibition times: a uniform administered admission price can concentrate demand at peak periods while off-peak gallery capacity remains unused, and the intervention uses bounded scarcity-linked prices plus protected inventory and access credits. It concerns different actors, resources, observable states, authority decisions, safeguards, and behavioral responses; it neither modifies the loan-slot system nor depends on Proposal 1 and can be adopted independently.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":[],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}