{"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-risk-tiered-accession-review","proposal_index":4,"version":0,"title":"Risk-Tiered Accession Review for Time-Bounded Object Offers","problem":"A museum routes every proposed object acquisition through the same serial documentation sequence and periodic collections-committee calendar, regardless of risk or readiness. Some offers have external deadlines because an estate is closing, a building is being cleared, or a current custodian cannot continue holding the object. When otherwise in-scope, stable, adequately documented cases wait between sequential reviews, the offer may be withdrawn or the object and its contextual information may be dispersed. The substantive acquisition standards may be justified; the potentially avoidable wedge is applying one slow approval path to every case and forbidding any bounded custody bridge.","actors":["Object donors, sellers, and current custodians","Community historians and knowledge holders","Museum curators and collections managers","Registrars and collections committee members","Conservators and hazardous-material specialists","Provenance, legal, ethics, privacy, and rights reviewers","Source communities and cultural authorities","Storage, security, and facilities staff","Museum governing body"],"observable_state":"For each proposed acquisition in one collecting area, the museum can record the offer deadline, collecting-scope fit, review stages, handoff and active-review times, repeated information requests, risk classifications, storage readiness, substantive concerns, committee dates, temporary-custody requests, withdrawal or disposal before decision, final decision, and reasons. The diagnostic distinguishes calendar and routing delay from time required to resolve title, provenance, cultural authority, hazards, condition, authenticity, privacy, cost, or storage questions.","consequence":"A mutually acceptable transfer can fail before a decision even though the object fits the collecting plan and could satisfy every protected check, potentially separating the object from associated histories or leaving it unavailable for preservation and study. Donors and staff repeat work while completed reviews wait for the next stage. Conversely, faster acquisition can impose permanent care costs, accept disputed or illicit material, override cultural authority, or accumulate objects the museum cannot responsibly preserve.","affected_objective":"Reach timely, legitimate decisions on time-bounded acquisition offers while preserving collecting-plan discipline, valid title, provenance, source-community authority, legal and ethical compliance, object and worker safety, storage capacity, donor clarity, and sustainable long-term care.","intervention":"Pilot a risk-tiered accession pathway for no more than 20 cases from one collecting area over one year. Use a single intake record and run conservation, provenance, legal, cultural-authority, storage, and curatorial-fit reviews in parallel where their evidence is independent. A weekly delegated panel may decide only cases meeting preapproved low-risk criteria: within collecting scope, documented storage and care capacity, stable and nonhazardous condition, no unresolved title or provenance concern, no applicable cultural restriction or authority question, no sensitive human material, and no material privacy or donor-condition issue. All other cases remain with the full collections committee. For an external deadline, the registrar may use a standard temporary-deposit agreement for up to 60 days after safety and custody screening; the agreement transfers no ownership, promises no accession, identifies costs and withdrawal rights, and cannot be used when cultural, legal, provenance, hazard, or capacity concerns are unresolved. Time limits govern routing and communication, never automatic approval. The pathway expires unless affirmatively renewed after incidence and protected-outcome review.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Distortion Map","domain_realization":"The review separates substantive acquisition safeguards from serial routing, duplicated requests, committee-calendar waits, and the absence of a bounded custody bridge."},{"archetype_element":"Protected Constraint Safeguard","domain_realization":"Title, provenance, source-community authority, cultural restrictions, legality, ethics, authenticity, privacy, hazards, condition, collecting scope, storage, and long-term care remain decision gates."},{"archetype_element":"Surplus Estimate","domain_realization":"The assessment counts potentially feasible transfers lost during procedural waiting, contextual information preserved, staff rework, temporary-custody costs, long-term care obligations, and disputed nonmonetary values without treating every offered object as beneficial."},{"archetype_element":"Affected-Party Incidence Map","domain_realization":"Effects are recorded separately for current custodians, source communities, museum staff, future researchers and audiences, and units responsible for storage and perpetual care."},{"archetype_element":"Redesign Lever","domain_realization":"One undifferentiated serial approval path becomes parallel review plus narrowly delegated decisions for preclassified low-risk cases and a nonaccessioning temporary-deposit bridge."},{"archetype_element":"Distributional Review","domain_realization":"Monitoring tests whether applicants with institutional knowledge navigate the faster path more easily, whether community offers receive adequate assistance, and whether costs shift to collections-care staff or source communities."},{"archetype_element":"Behavioral Response Model","domain_realization":"The pilot anticipates risk understatement, deadline manufacture, fragmented offers, temporary deposits becoming de facto accessions, reviewer overload, and pressure to treat procedural deadlines as approval mandates."},{"archetype_element":"Implementation Boundary","domain_realization":"The pathway covers one collecting area, one year, and at most 20 cases; high-risk categories and unresolved substantive concerns remain outside delegated authority."},{"archetype_element":"Monitoring and Rebound Check","domain_realization":"The museum tracks decision time by stage, withdrawals, repeat requests, temporary-deposit duration, staff workload, risk reclassification, adverse custody events, storage commitments, complaints, and decision reversals."},{"archetype_element":"Rollback or Adjustment Rule","domain_realization":"Delegated approvals and new temporary deposits stop if eligibility, safety, authority, workload, or de facto-accession triggers fire; undecided cases return to the ordinary committee pathway."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"distortion_reduction_review","role":"Determines whether a failed transfer was blocked by avoidable routing or calendar delay rather than by a necessary substantive inquiry, lack of storage, or incompatibility with the collecting plan.","counterfactual_removal":"Without this diagnostic, unresolved provenance, consent, safety, or capacity work could be mislabeled as procedural waste."},{"mechanism_slug":"permit_or_approval_streamlining","role":"Provides the core intervention by separating substantive checks from procedural drag, reusing one intake record, parallelizing independent reviews, and delegating only predefined low-risk decisions.","counterfactual_removal":"Without approval-path redesign, the proposal would merely urge staff to work faster inside the same serial rule and would not remove the binding calendar wedge."},{"mechanism_slug":"impact_assessment_table","role":"Records each party's expected and observed benefit, burden, protected interest, uncertainty, and monitoring trigger for every pilot case.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the table, faster decisions could conceal permanent storage burdens, unequal access to the pathway, or concentrated harms to source communities and current custodians."},{"mechanism_slug":"cost_benefit_assessment_protocol","role":"Compares preserved acquisition opportunities and reduced rework with temporary-custody expense, staff demands, perpetual-care costs, distributional effects, and risks under alternative assumptions.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the full assessment, shorter processing time or more accessions could be mistaken for net value even when the museum acquires unsustainable obligations."},{"mechanism_slug":"regulatory_simplification_pilot","role":"Walls the faster pathway off by collection, case count, duration, risk criteria, delegated authority, monitoring, and automatic expiry.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the bounded pilot, the museum would alter acquisition governance across the collection before observing misclassification, custody, workload, and equity responses."},{"mechanism_slug":"sunset_clause_review","role":"Requires the delegated pathway and temporary-deposit authority to expire unless each procedural relaxation re-earns approval against protected-purpose evidence.","counterfactual_removal":"Without expiry, emergency or low-risk exceptions could become an unreviewed permanent route around collections governance."}],"causal_chain":["A museum applies the same serial approval sequence and committee calendar to acquisition offers with different risk profiles.","An otherwise potentially acceptable offer has an external custody deadline shorter than the ordinary pathway.","Completed reviews wait for later handoffs or committee dates, while the museum lacks authority to make a bounded temporary deposit.","The custodian withdraws, disposes of, or disperses the object before the museum reaches a decision.","A single intake, parallel independent checks, and preapproved risk criteria expose which cases can be decided without reducing substantive scrutiny.","A delegated panel decides only fully cleared low-risk cases, while complex cases remain with the full committee.","When necessary and safe, a time-limited deposit agreement preserves the decision opportunity without transferring ownership or promising accession.","Potentially beneficial transfers can therefore reach an authorized decision before external deadlines without widening the collecting scope or treating silence as approval.","Monitoring of custody, authority, workload, storage, equity, and decision quality determines whether the pathway expires, narrows, or continues."],"baseline":"All proposed acquisitions follow the ordinary sequence of curatorial intake, documentation, specialist review, and periodic collections-committee decision. Reviews may occur serially, information may be requested more than once, and an offer ready between committee dates waits for the next meeting. Temporary custody before accession is unavailable or handled ad hoc, and low-risk cases lack a distinct delegated path.","nearest_rivals":["Hire more collections staff or convene the full committee more frequently: this increases review capacity but does not remove unnecessary serial dependencies or create bounded authority between meetings.","Lower provenance, consent, conservation, or storage standards: this may shorten review by removing protection rather than separating procedural delay from substantive scrutiny.","Digitize or document an offered object without acquiring it: this can preserve some information but does not preserve the object, associated custody, or future material study.","Create a broad emergency-acquisition power: this may meet deadlines but lacks low-risk criteria, independent checks, case limits, and a nonownership custody option.","Improve donor guidance and forms: clearer information can reduce incomplete applications, but it does not address completed reviews waiting in a serial calendar.","Expand the collecting plan or storage capacity: these address scope and supply constraints, not avoidable delay affecting already in-scope cases."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The proposal is appropriate only when serial routing, duplicated intake, committee timing, or the absence of bounded temporary custody is the binding cause of a lost decision opportunity. If delay primarily reflects unresolved title, provenance, cultural authority, authenticity, hazard, storage, funding, or collecting-scope questions, faster routing cannot recover the transfer without weakening a legitimate constraint.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The museum governing body approves the pilot, eligible collecting area, case cap, low-risk criteria, temporary-deposit form, delegated panel, monitoring triggers, and sunset. The full collections committee retains authority over all nonqualifying cases. Registrars, conservators, legal and provenance reviewers, and applicable source-community or cultural authorities retain veto or approval authority within their protected domains.","authorized_first_step":"Authorize a retrospective pathway audit and paper triage of completed acquisition cases. No live delegated decision or temporary deposit may occur until the governing body approves the bounded pilot and its agreements.","excluded_actions":["Treating a routing deadline or reviewer silence as approval","Transferring ownership before an authorized accession decision and executed instrument of transfer","Using temporary deposit as a promise of accession or allowing it to continue beyond the approved term without full review","Delegating cases involving human remains, sacred or culturally restricted material, hazardous substances, disputed title, unresolved provenance, illegal trade, privacy concerns, coercive donor terms, or applicable source-community authority","Accepting an object without documented storage, care capacity, and collecting-plan fit","Splitting a related offer into smaller cases to evade the case cap or risk classification","Overriding a conservator, registrar, legal reviewer, provenance reviewer, or applicable cultural authority","Expanding collecting scope, storage capacity, or acquisition budgets through the pilot","Penalizing staff or community representatives for pausing a case on protected-purpose grounds"],"halt_rollback":"Suspend new delegated decisions and temporary deposits if a custody loss, hazard, title or provenance failure, cultural-authority breach, repeated risk misclassification, expired deposit, unplanned storage burden, material workload overload, or deadline gaming occurs. Return undecided cases to the ordinary committee pathway, secure or return deposited objects under their agreements, preserve all legal and cultural holds, and require governing-body review before resumption."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"A records review shows that most elapsed time is necessary to resolve provenance, title, cultural authority, condition, authenticity, storage, or funding questions; apparently low-risk cases are rarely lost to deadlines; or parallel review merely moves work into specialist queues without shortening authorized decisions.","problem_falsifier":"The inferred problem is falsified if no otherwise feasible acquisition was withdrawn, dispersed, or placed at documented risk because of serial routing, committee timing, duplicated intake, or the absence of a lawful custody bridge.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is falsified if the pilot does not reduce procedural waiting or preserve additional decision opportunities, or if it creates unacceptable misclassification, de facto accession, custody incidents, staff overload, inequitable access, storage burdens, or protected-authority failures that boundary adjustments cannot correct.","risks":["Applicants may manufacture deadlines to obtain priority.","Staff may understate risk to meet routing targets.","Parallel reviews may duplicate work or overload the same specialists.","Temporary deposits may become de facto permanent holdings.","Depositors may misunderstand temporary custody as guaranteed accession.","Objects may carry concealed hazards, title defects, or cultural restrictions.","Low-risk criteria may favor well-documented institutional donors over community custodians with oral or nonstandard evidence.","Faster decisions may increase long-term storage and conservation obligations.","Case-count limits may be captured by early or well-connected applicants.","The pilot collecting area may not represent more sensitive or complex collections.","Shorter elapsed time may obscure declines in deliberative or documentation quality."]},"next_evidence_step":"Review the most recent 24 completed, withdrawn, or expired acquisition offers from one collecting area, without changing any decision. Build an event log of offer deadlines, intake completeness, review start and finish times, interstage waiting, repeated requests, substantive concerns, committee dates, storage readiness, withdrawal timing, and final outcome. Have curatorial, registration, conservation, provenance or legal, and source-community liaison reviewers independently paper-classify each case under the proposed low-risk criteria and identify reviews that could safely have run in parallel. Simulate the delegated pathway and 60-day deposit boundary, reporting disagreements, cases for which the result would change, staff capacity requirements, affected-party incidence, and every assumption under which the apparent benefit disappears.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Proposal 1 addresses fixed outgoing-loan capacity after approval: stalled borrowers retain quota slots, and milestone-based release reallocates those slots. Proposal 4 instead concerns whether an offered object can reach an acquisition decision before an external custody deadline; it redesigns serial internal approval and temporary custody, not allocation of an existing loan quota. Proposal 2 addresses visitor demand across exhibition times using peak and off-peak admission prices with protected inventory. Proposal 4 neither prices attendance nor manages gallery congestion; its lever is risk-tiered review and delegated accession authority. Proposal 3 addresses a bundled monetary charge for reuse of existing digital images through purpose-based fee decomposition and service tiers. Proposal 4 changes no reproduction fee or digital-delivery rule; it concerns physical acquisition governance, ownership transfer, and pre-accession custody. Its resource, actors, wedge, intervention, authority, safeguards, evidence, and causal chain are distinct from all three earlier proposals, and it can be adopted independently.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":[],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}