{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp05_complete_proposal_portfolio20_20260803","cell_id":"deadweight_loss_reduction__sociology_anthropology","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"cand_mutual_preference_field_practicum_clearing","proposal_index":4,"version":0,"title":"Mutual-Preference Clearing for Community Field-Practicum Placements","problem":"A sociology and anthropology department assigns students to community field-practicum projects through separate, sequential negotiations led by individual faculty members. Approved hosts and eligible students may both be available, yet early provisional commitments, incompatible deadlines, duplicate approaches to popular hosts, and the absence of a coordinated rematching round can leave acceptable host projects and student capacity unmatched. The protective requirements for student safety, community consent, educational quality, and host workload are legitimate. The candidate problem is the avoidable coordination wedge created by the fragmented assignment rule after those requirements are satisfied, not a lack of hosts or students.","actors":["Students seeking field-practicum placements","Community organizations and project stewards offering placements","Community members affected by proposed student activities","Faculty advisers who sponsor placements","The departmental practicum director","Student-safety, accessibility, labor, and research-ethics officials","Previously underserved students who may have fewer faculty-mediated connections"],"observable_state":"During a placement cycle, the same host receives several sequential inquiries while other approved projects receive none; students hold provisional offers while awaiting preferred options; hosts and students face different response deadlines; rejected or withdrawn offers do not reliably trigger rematching; and the cycle ends with unfilled approved projects and eligible unplaced students despite recorded pairs that each side would have considered acceptable. The diagnostic signature is compatible but unrealized pairings caused by the sequence and fragmentation of assignment, rather than missing supply or failed eligibility.","consequence":"Potentially acceptable educational placements and community-defined projects remain unrealized, while students substitute less suitable assignments, delay a practicum, or rely on personal faculty connections. Hosts may spend effort evaluating duplicate inquiries and still receive no placement. A centralized match could nevertheless burden communities, suppress relationship-based judgment, or allocate students to nominally compatible but unwanted roles, so maximizing the number of placements is not sufficient.","affected_objective":"Realize more mutually acceptable, community-authorized field-practicum placements while preserving voluntary participation, student safety and accessibility, educational standards, community workload limits, labor protections, and each party's right to reject a proposed match.","intervention":"Create a bounded mutual-preference batch clearing process for one practicum cycle. Before matching, the department separately verifies student eligibility and host-project safeguards. Hosts publish community-defined task requirements, capacity, timing, supervision, accessibility, and unacceptable conditions; students submit constraints and rank only placements they would accept; hosts rank only acceptable students or profiles and may choose no match. A transparent clearing rule produces provisional pairings subject to a direct confirmation conversation and mutual veto. Declined pairings enter one documented fallback round rather than reverting immediately to faculty-by-faculty negotiation. Faculty may advise but cannot privately reserve placements before the clearing date. The pilot expires after one cycle and retains an exception path for relationships whose obligations cannot be represented in the common intake.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Value-blocking wedge","domain_realization":"Fragmented, sequential placement commitments prevent simultaneously available students and host projects from being considered as a common set of mutually acceptable pairings."},{"archetype_element":"Idle capacity and shortage coexistence","domain_realization":"Approved host capacity remains unfilled while eligible students remain without placements, even though some unmade pairs satisfy both sides' stated constraints."},{"archetype_element":"Protected purpose","domain_realization":"Eligibility review, community consent, safety, accessibility, educational quality, labor boundaries, host workload limits, and mutual refusal rights remain outside the optimization target."},{"archetype_element":"Avoidable distortion","domain_realization":"Deadline mismatch, provisional holding, duplicate approaches, private reservation, and the absence of a structured rematching round cause compatible pairs to disappear from consideration."},{"archetype_element":"Redesign lever","domain_realization":"A pooled intake, simultaneous mutual-preference clearing, direct confirmation, and one fallback round replace uncoordinated sequential assignment."},{"archetype_element":"Surplus estimate","domain_realization":"The inquiry counts additional mutually confirmed placements, community-defined tasks activated, avoided duplicate screening, and reduced placement delay while exposing uncertainty about match quality and relational value."},{"archetype_element":"Affected-party incidence","domain_realization":"Effects are separated for students with and without faculty connections, large and small hosts, community members, faculty advisers, administrators, and unmatched participants."},{"archetype_element":"Behavioral-response model","domain_realization":"Monitoring tests preference misstatement, strategic ranking, host withdrawal, student option-hoarding, off-system reservations, and pressure to accept an algorithmic proposal."},{"archetype_element":"Implementation boundary","domain_realization":"The intervention covers one department, one practicum cycle, a defined set of placements, and only projects that have independently passed safeguard review."},{"archetype_element":"Rollback rule","domain_realization":"The department can suspend clearing, restore direct placement, or exempt a project if consent, safety, representation, labor, or relational-obligation triggers fail."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"distortion_reduction_review","role":"Establish whether unfilled projects and unplaced students reflect compatible but unrealized pairings, and separate matching loss from genuine host scarcity, student ineligibility, safety exclusions, or lack of mutual interest.","counterfactual_removal":"Without this diagnostic, the department could impose a matching mechanism on a supply shortage or treat protective incompatibilities as waste."},{"mechanism_slug":"matching_improvement_program","role":"Pool eligible participants, make compatibility dimensions explicit, collect mutual acceptability and preferences, perform a simultaneous clearing, and rematch declined proposals without forcing participation.","counterfactual_removal":"Without rebuilding the matching process, known participants would continue making sequential commitments that remove options before mutually acceptable alternatives can be compared."},{"mechanism_slug":"impact_assessment_table","role":"Record each group's access, workload, autonomy, match outcome, protected interest, and monitoring trigger, including hosts and students who remain unmatched or opt out.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the table, a higher placement count could conceal concentrated burdens on small community organizations, reduced access for students with constraints, or pressure to accept unsuitable matches."},{"mechanism_slug":"cost_benefit_assessment_protocol","role":"Compare additional mutually confirmed placements and avoided duplicate coordination with intake work, preference-elicitation burden, disrupted relationships, fallback administration, and possible loss of nuanced faculty or community judgment.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the full comparison and sensitivity analysis, the number of algorithmic pairings could be mistaken for net value regardless of quality, burden, or distribution."},{"mechanism_slug":"regulatory_simplification_pilot","role":"Test the common clearing rule for one defined cycle, monitor protected outcomes and strategic responses, retain scoped exceptions, and revert automatically unless renewal is justified.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a bounded pilot and expiry, an untested assignment rule could displace relationship-based arrangements across the department before its compatibility model and safeguards are evaluated."}],"causal_chain":["Eligible students and approved community hosts enter a placement cycle governed by separate faculty-mediated negotiations.","Sequential offers, inconsistent deadlines, duplicate approaches, and provisional commitments remove participants from consideration at different times.","Some mutually acceptable pairs are never evaluated, even as students remain unplaced and approved host capacity remains unused.","A distortion review tests whether those unrealized pairs exist after all safety, consent, accessibility, labor, and educational requirements are applied.","A common intake makes host capacities, student constraints, and mutual acceptability available within one bounded decision window.","Simultaneous preference clearing considers the feasible set before provisional commitments fragment it.","A direct confirmation conversation allows either party to reject a proposed pairing and preserves contextual judgment that the intake could not encode.","One fallback round reconnects declined or released capacity with remaining mutually acceptable options.","More of the already-eligible capacity can become confirmed placements if fragmented sequencing was the binding wedge.","Incidence and behavioral monitoring determine whether any recovered placements are offset by coercion, strategic reporting, host burden, weak match quality, inequitable access, or off-system reservations.","The department revises or abandons the clearing rule if it does not outperform the baseline under the precommitted protection and distributional criteria."],"baseline":"Faculty members and students approach hosts individually throughout the placement period. Hosts evaluate inquiries as they arrive, and students may pursue or hold more than one possibility. Deadlines and information formats vary. Placements become final through bilateral agreement, but withdrawals and refusals are circulated informally, with no required pooled view of remaining acceptable combinations and no scheduled rematching round. Safety, eligibility, and educational reviews occur within or alongside these negotiations.","nearest_rivals":["A searchable host directory: this lowers discovery costs but leaves sequential commitments, conflicting deadlines, option-holding, and failed rematching intact.","Recruiting additional community hosts: this increases nominal supply but does not test whether existing approved capacity is stranded by the assignment process.","More faculty placement advisers: this adds bilateral coordination capacity while preserving siloed negotiation and connection-dependent access.","A first-come centralized queue: this standardizes order but still evaluates pairs sequentially and does not use mutual compatibility or preferences.","Departmental assignment without host and student vetoes: this could fill slots administratively but would sacrifice the voluntary and relational protections the proposal preserves.","Host or student placement quotas: these divide capacity by category but do not solve incompatibility among individual projects, schedules, supervision needs, and student constraints.","Informal networking events: these may build trust and reveal options, but they do not prevent provisional commitments from fragmenting the feasible matching set."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The primary wedge is not ordinary search cost: the relevant students and hosts can already be identified, yet decentralized sequential commitments prevent known compatible options from being jointly considered. Nor is the intervention an allocation of interchangeable slots; project requirements, schedules, supervision, community conditions, and student constraints make pairing compatibility central. If no mutually acceptable unrealized pairs exist after protections are applied, or if relationship formation rather than matching sequence is binding, the candidate's causal claim fails.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The departmental practicum authority may govern the timing and procedure for placements carrying departmental credit. Each host retains authority to accept or reject a student and define community-approved task boundaries; each student retains authority to accept or reject a placement. Safety, accessibility, labor, legal, and research-ethics bodies retain their existing jurisdiction and cannot be overridden by a match.","authorized_first_step":"Run a retrospective or shadow clearing exercise using de-identified prior placement records or nonbinding preferences collected for an upcoming cycle. Compare proposed pairings with the actual baseline without changing placements, contacting communities outside approved channels, or representing any simulated match as an offer.","excluded_actions":["Forcing a student or host to accept a proposed match","Treating a ranking as consent to fieldwork, research participation, data collection, publication, or cultural access","Matching an ineligible or unapproved project to improve the placement count","Overriding community-defined exclusions, student accessibility needs, safety determinations, labor rules, or supervision limits","Allowing faculty to reserve clearing-pool placements privately before the common decision date","Revealing confidential student constraints or community information through rankings or match explanations","Penalizing a participant for ranking few options, choosing no match, rejecting a proposal, or using the authorized exception path","Optimizing solely for the number of filled placements","Extending the pilot beyond the defined cycle without an authorized evidence and incidence review"],"halt_rollback":"Pause an affected pairing if either party reports pressure, a disclosed constraint was ignored, confidential information was exposed, or the project crosses its approved task boundary. Suspend the clearing round if safeguard-ineligible projects enter the pool, hosts cannot withdraw freely, systematic off-system reservations undermine the feasible set, or the algorithm cannot produce an auditable explanation under the published criteria. Return unresolved participants to the authorized baseline process. The pilot expires after the cycle unless affirmatively renewed."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"The strongest counterevidence would show that apparent compatible pairs are not actually acceptable after relationship history, community authority, supervision quality, safety, accessibility, timing, and student learning needs are considered, or that candid preferences cannot be elicited without damaging trust and strategic behavior overwhelms the clearing process.","problem_falsifier":"The problem is falsified if a bounded reconstruction finds no eligible unplaced student and unfilled approved host project that were mutually acceptable during the same decision window, or if unfilled capacity is explained by raw host scarcity, missing supervision, ineligibility, or lack of interest rather than fragmented sequencing.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is falsified if a shadow or live bounded pilot does not increase mutually confirmed, subsequently retained placements or reduce duplicate approaches and placement delay, or if any increase is outweighed under precommitted criteria by weaker fit, host burden, student pressure, inequitable outcomes, confidentiality failures, strategic manipulation, or erosion of community authority.","risks":["Students or hosts may rank strategically rather than report genuine acceptability.","Participants may interpret a provisional match as an obligation despite formal veto rights.","A common intake may flatten relational, cultural, or historical conditions that resist standardized fields.","Small community organizations may bear disproportionate profile and ranking work.","Hosts may withdraw if the process feels extractive or administratively heavy.","Students with complex accessibility, caregiving, transport, or scheduling constraints may receive fewer feasible matches.","Faculty may create off-system reservations that reduce the pool and privilege connected students.","An algorithmic objective may favor easily matched participants over those needing individualized support.","Ranking information or stated constraints may expose confidential community or student circumstances.","A fallback round may occur too late for travel, onboarding, or community preparation.","Nominally confirmed placements may fail later if the process accelerates agreement without building trust.","Community projects may be treated as interchangeable educational inventory.","Increasing placement completion may intensify uncompensated host supervision or displace community priorities.","A pilot in one course or cycle may not transfer to placements with longer relational histories."]},"next_evidence_step":"For one completed placement cycle, construct a de-identified event ledger of eligible students, approved hosts, project capacities, expressed constraints, inquiry and offer dates, provisional commitments, withdrawals, final matches, unfilled projects, and unplaced students. With authorized host and student representatives, define which compatibility facts may legitimately be reconstructed and which must remain unknown. Run a shadow mutual-preference clearing using only recorded or explicitly nonbinding acceptability information, then compare proposed and actual outcomes for mutually confirmed pairings, unmatched parties, duplicate approaches, decision time, distribution across connection levels, and safeguard exclusions. Do not alter placements. Consider a live one-cycle pilot only if the shadow exercise identifies unrealized mutually acceptable pairs and the parties approve the intake, confidentiality, veto, and exception rules.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Proposal 1 addressed delayed ethics amendments during active ethnographic fieldwork and used preauthorized adaptation envelopes with risk-triggered escalation. Proposal 4 does not change ethical-review timing or researcher authority; it coordinates already-eligible students and already-approved host projects through mutual-preference clearing. Proposal 2 addressed stranded anthropology-archive support hours inside a fixed capacity cap and used readiness checkpoints, protected pools, and periodic reassignment. Proposal 4 concerns noninterchangeable bilateral compatibility rather than reallocating fungible archive hours: both student and host rank acceptable counterparts and retain a veto. Proposal 3 addressed a fixed honorarium ceiling for community advisers and used contextual compensation bands plus direct influence safeguards. Proposal 4 changes neither payment levels nor terms of exchange; its wedge arises from fragmented sequencing and incompatible commitments even when prices are absent. The new proposal therefore has a distinct problem, intervention, governing authority, and causal path and can be adopted without implementing any earlier proposal.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Initial complete proposal at index 4","Material differentiation from sealed proposals 1, 2, and 3","Operational specification of the matching wedge, mutual authority, safeguards, falsifiers, and bounded first evidence"],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}