{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp06_four_proposal_generalization60_20260803","cell_id":"bounded_rivalry_governance__chemistry_materials","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"brg-chem-materials-priority-compact-004","proposal_index":4,"version":0,"title":"Modular Priority Compact for Polymer-Depolymerization Research","problem":"Research groups in a precompetitive consortium pursue catalyst, separation, and reactor contributions to a polymer-depolymerization process. A finite foreground-IP share, recognized priority, and limited lead-integration roles give each group reason to be first. Under ordinary publication and patent races, a team can improve its position by withholding intermediate results, duplicating a rival's hazardous experiments, rushing scale or safety review, filing claims broader than its demonstrated contribution, monopolizing shared equipment, challenging attribution strategically, or obstructing access to an enabling module. Rival teams can also divide claims or exchange unsupported attribution. The race can therefore reward secrecy, hazardous acceleration, and control of complementary knowledge rather than verified contributions that other consortium members can safely combine.","actors":["Consortium research teams","Participating universities and materials firms","Consortium steering committee","Independent technical registry steward","Institutional intellectual-property offices","Shared-facility operators","Environmental health and safety reviewers","Process technicians and waste handlers","Downstream integration teams","Independent priority and attribution reviewer","Competition and access reviewer"],"observable_state":"Several teams pursue overlapping process modules while using shared instruments and precursor inventories. Experimental plans and negative results are disclosed unevenly; priority evidence is scattered across notebooks, presentations, patent drafts, and messages; parallel hazardous runs occur without a common resource ledger; and disputes arise only after teams learn which claims, integration roles, or licensing shares may be valuable.","consequence":"The consortium can pay for redundant escalation, lose opportunities to combine complementary results, expose personnel and facilities to avoidable rushed work, and create overlapping claims that impede later integration. A team controlling one enabling module can convert priority into veto power over subsequent contributors even when that power is unrelated to the consortium's discovery purpose.","affected_objective":"Preserve rivalrous motivation to produce verifiable polymer-depolymerization contributions while reducing first-to-disclose escalation, accelerating safe sharing after priority is secured, attributing modular contributions without winner-take-all process ownership, and keeping shared research infrastructure and future improvement paths contestable.","intervention":"Adopt a prospective priority compact before consortium research begins. Freeze a modular contribution map, finite foreground-credit pool, eligibility, evidence standards, confidential registry procedure, milestone thresholds, near-simultaneous submission rule, shared-resource caps, safety gates, prohibited conduct, attribution appeals, licensing floor, and review cadence. Eligible teams may pursue any method within approved safety and resource boundaries. A team secures a provisional timestamp by depositing a complete protocol, data package, uncertainty statement, safety record, and claimed module with an independent confidential registry; the timestamp preserves priority while technical and safety review proceeds, removing the need to publish or file broadly before verification. Credit is awarded only when a preregistered module threshold is verified, not by relative ranking across teams. Independently evidenced submissions registered within a fixed interval split the applicable module credit rather than entering a disputed winner-take-all race. Distinct improvements can earn predefined residual credit, but redundant restatements cannot. After the review and appeal window, validated protocols, limitations, safety observations, and negative boundary conditions enter a consortium repository with attribution so other teams can build on them. Each phase caps shared-facility hours, scarce precursor use, high-hazard runs, and sponsor-funded legal drafting; unused capacity returns to a common pool. Unapproved hazardous work, concealment of incidents, interference with equipment or samples, misuse of confidential registry entries, unsupported reciprocal attribution, coordinated milestone division, and strategic obstruction of released modules are fouls. Fixed cross-round screens may refer suspicious reciprocal credits, coordinated abstention, or claim division for independent inquiry but cannot decide intent. Consortium background tools, safety data, interfaces, and validated modules remain available under predeclared field-limited, nonexclusive terms; no contribution grants control of future rules or a veto over independent improvement. Qualified challengers may enter at each phase boundary. A post-phase review examines duplication, disclosure timing, safety deviations, concentration of credit, integration use, disputes, and access before the next module map is authorized.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Rivalry purpose statement","domain_realization":"Use rivalry to elicit timely, verifiable catalyst, separation, reactor, and integration contributions while making safe combination—not total process capture—the legitimate route to reward."},{"archetype_element":"Scarce prize or selection constraint","domain_realization":"A finite foreground-credit pool, recognized priority for defined modules, and a bounded number of lead-integration roles."},{"archetype_element":"Competitor eligibility boundary","domain_realization":"Only consortium teams accepting the registry, evidence, safety, resource, disclosure, licensing, and appeal terms may compete for credit."},{"archetype_element":"Contest arena boundary","domain_realization":"Independent experimentation and legitimate improvement within approved limits are allowed; unsafe acceleration, incident concealment, registry misuse, sabotage, unsupported attribution, claim division, and access obstruction are prohibited."},{"archetype_element":"Performance metric and scoring basis","domain_realization":"Each contribution is assessed against a frozen module-specific verification threshold and evidence standard rather than a comparative composite leaderboard."},{"archetype_element":"Fair process and due process layer","domain_realization":"A neutral timestamped registry, evidence access, near-simultaneous rule, documented technical review, attribution debrief, and independent appeal make priority contestable without public racing."},{"archetype_element":"Anti-sabotage and anti-collusion guardrail","domain_realization":"Registry access controls, equipment protections, fixed pattern screens, investigation separation, and graduated sanctions constrain evidence theft, obstruction, reciprocal attribution, and coordinated claim division."},{"archetype_element":"Externality and spillover boundary","domain_realization":"Existing safety approval remains noncontestable, while hazardous runs, precursor consumption, waste, incidents, and facility burdens are recorded against phase caps and cannot earn credit if unauthorized."},{"archetype_element":"Escalation and arms-race damper","domain_realization":"Confidential timestamps secure provisional priority; near-simultaneous submissions split credit; and caps limit hazardous experiments, shared assets, scarce inputs, and legal spending."},{"archetype_element":"Winner power and lock-in review","domain_realization":"Validated modules receive attribution but remain available under predeclared nonexclusive terms, and no contributor gains veto power over shared infrastructure, interfaces, or later improvements."},{"archetype_element":"Learning and recalibration loop","domain_realization":"Duplication, integration use, disclosure lag, safety deviations, disputes, concentrated credit, and access barriers determine revisions to milestones, caps, credit shares, or continued rivalry."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"contest_rulebook","role":"Freezes module definitions, eligibility, evidence, timestamps, verification, credit allocation, near-simultaneous treatment, resource limits, fouls, licensing, and appeals before teams know which contributions will succeed.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a binding rulebook, teams and sponsors could redefine priority, evidence, credit, or access after learning whose work is valuable."},{"mechanism_slug":"prize_challenge","role":"Converts each module into a preregistered, objectively verifiable threshold with a fixed portion of the finite credit pool paid on confirmed achievement rather than effort or committee preference.","counterfactual_removal":"Without outcome-defined module rewards, the consortium would revert to discretionary funding or one overall process winner, weakening the link between reward and independently usable contribution."},{"mechanism_slug":"multiple_award_or_portfolio_selection","role":"Decomposes the finite prize across complementary verified modules and reserves residual credit for nonredundant improvements, so the reward structure reflects an integrable process portfolio.","counterfactual_removal":"Without decomposition, one early broad claimant could capture the entire process prize even though later complementary modules are necessary for integration."},{"mechanism_slug":"spending_cap_or_resource_cap","role":"Caps shared-facility hours, scarce precursors, high-hazard runs, and sponsor-funded legal drafting per team and phase.","counterfactual_removal":"Without caps, teams could escalate experiments and claim drafting merely to preserve priority, shifting the race toward resource ownership and risk tolerance."},{"mechanism_slug":"sabotage_or_foul_penalty_schedule","role":"Precommits graduated consequences for equipment or sample interference, incident concealment, registry misuse, unsupported attribution, obstructive claiming, and coordinated milestone division.","counterfactual_removal":"Without published sanctions, attacks on rivals, evidence integrity, and shared access could become viable substitutes for producing a verified contribution."},{"mechanism_slug":"anti_collusion_monitoring","role":"Pools registry and attribution patterns across phases and applies fixed screens for reciprocal credits, synchronized abstention, duplicated evidentiary language, or divided claims, referring anomalies for independent inquiry only.","counterfactual_removal":"Without cross-phase monitoring, teams could soften rivalry by allocating modules or exchanging unsupported credit while each isolated submission appeared compliant."},{"mechanism_slug":"challenger_access_window","role":"Opens entry to qualified new teams at phase boundaries and releases unused shared-resource capacity after each phase.","counterfactual_removal":"Without bounded reopening, early consortium members could turn initial participation into permanent control of later contribution opportunities."},{"mechanism_slug":"antitrust_or_competition_review","role":"Tests whether control of an enabling patent, reagent, dataset, interface, or shared instrument forecloses independent improvement and may require access or removal of an obstructive exclusivity term.","counterfactual_removal":"Without winner-power review, a valid modular contribution could become a gate through which its owner controls all later rivalry."},{"mechanism_slug":"post_contest_impact_review","role":"Compares realized sharing, module reuse, duplication, safety burdens, attribution disputes, credit concentration, and integration outcomes with the compact's purpose before another phase is approved.","counterfactual_removal":"Without retrospective review, the consortium could preserve milestone rules that reward fragmented claims, unused modules, or concealed escalation."}],"causal_chain":["Finite credit, priority, and integration roles create rivalry among eligible consortium teams.","A frozen modular map makes the contested contribution units explicit before results and identities can reshape them.","Confidential deposits secure provisional priority without requiring immediate public disclosure, broad patent filing, or rushed scale-up.","Verification thresholds couple reward to demonstrated module completion rather than persuasive claims or relative rank.","The near-simultaneous rule reduces the payoff from hazardous last-minute acceleration and converts genuine parallel discovery into shared credit rather than a disputed zero-sum result.","Prize decomposition rewards complementary modules while preventing one broad process claim from absorbing the whole pool.","Resource and legal-spending caps constrain the fuel of experimental and patent arms races.","Post-verification disclosure with attribution allows competitors to build on validated work instead of unknowingly duplicating it.","Foul enforcement and anomaly referral change the payoff from sabotage, evidence misuse, reciprocal attribution, and coordinated module division.","Nonexclusive access, phase-boundary challengers, and winner-power review prevent priority from becoming control of future research infrastructure.","Post-phase evidence recalibrates the module map, credit structure, caps, access rules, or continued use of the compact."],"baseline":"Consortium participants pursue overlapping research under ordinary institutional patent and publication practices. Priority is reconstructed after the fact from fragmented records; teams decide independently when to disclose; foreground ownership is negotiated around broad claims; shared equipment and hazardous work are governed separately from attribution incentives; and integration begins only after positions have hardened.","nearest_rivals":["Conventional patent and publication race: it supplies strong priority incentives but encourages withholding, broad claiming, duplicative acceleration, and disputes after value is visible.","Undifferentiated joint ownership of all foreground work: it reduces winner-take-all rivalry but can weaken contribution-specific incentives and create shared veto or licensing problems.","An overall winner-take-all inducement prize: it fixes an outcome target but can duplicate whole process efforts, underreward complementary modules, and preserve a dangerous finish-line race.","Ordinary grant allocation: it funds effort prospectively but does not secure priority through rapid disclosure or align modular credit with verified results.","A patent pool created after separate filings: it can support later licensing but acts after secrecy, duplicated experiments, legal escalation, and overlapping claims have already occurred.","Fully open collaboration without scarce contribution credit: it promotes sharing but removes the bounded rivalrous pressure this proposal is designed to preserve."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"Holding existing scientific verification and safety authority constant, the proposal's distinguishing testable claim is that confidential provisional priority, modular threshold rewards, near-simultaneous credit sharing, phase resource caps, and nonexclusive integration access can redirect a patent and publication race toward early safe disclosure and combinable contributions without selecting a single best material, procuring a service, or governing product-market transactions. If ordinary joint-development terms already yield equivalent disclosure timing, attribution, bounded duplication, safety behavior, and open improvement paths, the compact adds no contrastive value.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The consortium steering committee may authorize only a retrospective paper simulation. Any live change to foreground ownership, patent filing, publication, attribution, funding, equipment access, safety limits, licensing, sanctions, or consortium membership requires consent from the participating institutions and the authorities already responsible for intellectual property, research integrity, contracts, laboratory operations, and environmental health and safety. Safety officers retain unconditional authority over all experimental work.","authorized_first_step":"Using records from one completed consortium project, preregister a shadow module map, evidence thresholds, timestamp rule, near-simultaneous interval, credit decomposition, resource caps, access floor, and appeal procedure; then reconstruct how existing contributions would have been registered and credited without changing ownership, authorship, funding, or patent positions.","excluded_actions":["No synthesis, reaction, scale-up, sampling, transport, or testing","No change to a patent filing, inventorship determination, authorship, license, contract, grant, payment, facility allocation, or consortium membership","No public disclosure of confidential protocols, negative results, notebooks, patent drafts, contributor identities, or shadow credits","No legal conclusion about patentability, validity, infringement, inventorship, or ownership","No finding of sabotage, collusion, misconduct, or unsafe conduct from missing records or pattern screens alone","No contact with teams, institutions, patent offices, journals, regulators, or downstream licensees for new evidence","No waiver or substitution of safety, research-integrity, confidentiality, export-control, employment, or intellectual-property requirements","No use of the shadow registry to establish real priority"],"halt_rollback":"Stop if records cannot be de-identified, timestamps cannot be independently reconstructed, modules cannot be separated without inventing technical boundaries, confidential information would be exposed, or reviewers cannot apply the verification and credit rules consistently. Delete contributor-level shadow priority and credit records under existing retention rules, preserve only an access-controlled methods-and-limitations note, and leave all real ownership, attribution, access, and legal positions unchanged."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"Existing project records may show that current joint-development agreements already secure confidential priority, promptly release validated modules, split credit for parallel independent work, cap hazardous and shared-resource escalation, provide neutral attribution appeals, prevent blocking exclusivity, admit later contributors, and produce integrated reuse without strategic disputes.","problem_falsifier":"The problem is falsified if priority, credit, and integration roles are not scarce; teams do not alter disclosure, experimental pace, claims, or access in response to rivals; overlapping work is scientifically necessary rather than strategic duplication; or ordinary safety and IP processes already remove consequential rivalry routes.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is falsified if modules and thresholds cannot be specified before discovery, confidential registry deposits do not reduce withholding or acceleration, near-simultaneous splitting creates more strategic clustering, resource caps block necessary exploration without reducing rivalry waste, or nonexclusive access makes participants withdraw essential contributions.","risks":["A fixed module map may miss discoveries that reorganize the process architecture.","Teams may fragment one contribution across several milestones to collect excess credit.","Thresholds may reward technically valid modules that do not integrate into a useful process.","A confidential registry creates a concentrated target for proprietary information.","Provisional timestamps may encourage incomplete deposits designed only to reserve priority.","The near-simultaneous interval may be gamed through strategic delay or information leakage.","Credit splitting may weaken incentives for expensive confirmation work.","Resource caps may favor incumbents that already possess instruments, precursors, or background data.","Hazard accounting may drive risky work into unrecorded categories or outside consortium facilities.","Background-IP classifications may be manipulated to avoid nonexclusive foreground terms.","Independent reviewers may acquire conflicts through technical familiarity with the teams.","Collusion screens may mistake legitimate modular specialization for coordinated claim division.","Nonexclusive access terms may be incompatible with some participants' financing assumptions.","Rapid repository disclosure may compromise later publication or external filing choices.","A dominant integration team may exercise informal control even without formal veto rights.","Post-phase review may privilege modules that produced visible positive results and overlook informative failures." ]},"next_evidence_step":"Run the authorized retrospective simulation on one completed consortium project using only existing dated notebooks, internal disclosures, equipment logs, safety approvals, waste records, meeting records, patent drafts, and integration reports. Before opening contributor identities, freeze the module map, minimum deposit contents, verification thresholds, timestamp precedence, near-simultaneous interval, duplicate-versus-improvement rule, credit shares, phase caps, and protected-access floor. Two independent reviewers should reconstruct deposits, determine which modules could have passed using contemporaneous evidence, identify parallel submissions, calculate shadow credit, and compare the result with actual attribution, equal joint ownership, first-disclosure priority, and one overall prize. Record reviewer agreement, unclassifiable contributions, disclosure lag, duplicated facility use, safety deviations already documented, credit concentration, module reuse, access dependencies, and pattern flags that would only justify inquiry. Produce no scientific, legal, ownership, or misconduct determination beyond the bounded shadow exercise.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Proposal 1 is a comparative scientific selection contest: teams receive equal experimental resources, submit solid-electrolyte films to coded common tests, receive composite ranks, and compete for one pilot slot. This replacement does not compare candidate materials, run a leaderboard, use common specimens, select a finalist, or allocate pilot capacity. It governs priority and disclosure across complementary research contributions through confidential timestamps, modular achievement thresholds, shared credit for near-simultaneous work, and nonexclusive integration. Proposal 2 is a sealed reverse procurement: solvent-recovery suppliers price a full service basket, compete for contract lots, post residual liability, and are evaluated through delivery reconciliation. This replacement has no purchaser, price bid, service contract, supplier lot, or procurement award; its scarce rewards are research priority, a finite contribution-credit pool, and bounded integration roles. Proposal 3 governs continuous marketplace rivalry among recycled-polymer sellers using shipment-linked claim escrow, transaction reserves, buyer-defined search, ratings, promotion caps, and platform-neutral access. This replacement has no product listings, buyers, shipments, marketplace ranking, retained commercial samples, or transaction reputation; it acts before commercialization on consortium disclosure, attribution, experimental escalation, and control of enabling research modules. The consortium can adopt it without changing the other three arenas.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Replace proposal 4's sealed capacity auction because it duplicated proposal 2's governed-auction intervention family.","Create a fourth opportunity distinct from comparative scientific selection, reverse procurement, and continuous marketplace governance.","Preserve bounded rivalry by governing scarce priority, modular rewards, permissible research conduct, escalation, spillovers, due process, collusion, winner power, reopening, and recalibration."],"conceptual_changes":["Replaced competition for wastewater-treatment slots with a priority and contribution race inside a polymer-depolymerization consortium.","Removed price bidding and constraint-feasible portfolio clearing.","Changed the causal path to confidential priority security, modular threshold rewards, near-simultaneous credit sharing, post-verification disclosure, and nonexclusive integration access."],"operational_changes":["Introduced a neutral timestamp registry, preregistered module map, finite contribution-credit pool, phase resource caps, safety-gated eligibility, attribution appeals, and protected access terms.","Made rewards threshold-based and modular rather than price-cleared allocations.","Added explicit controls for broad claiming, registry misuse, reciprocal attribution, experimental escalation, and blocking control of enabling modules."],"evidence_changes":["Replaced wastewater scheduling replay with a retrospective contribution, disclosure, resource-use, safety, and integration simulation using one completed consortium project.","Excluded scientific, patent, ownership, and misconduct determinations from the bounded evidence step."],"claim_changes":["Withdrew the claim that a forward treatment-capacity auction is portfolio-distinct from the existing reverse procurement auction.","Limited the replacement claim to whether priority security and prize decomposition can redirect a research priority race toward safe disclosure and combinable contributions."]}}