{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp06_four_proposal_generalization60_20260803","cell_id":"bounded_rivalry_governance__nanotechnology","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"capped_endurance_prize_nanocatalyst","proposal_index":3,"version":0,"title":"Capped Endurance Prize for a Durable Nanocatalyst","problem":"A research sponsor has one follow-on demonstration award for a nanocatalyst program. Teams currently establish standing through publications, presentations, and sponsor reports emphasizing peak conversion or selectivity under team-chosen conditions. Competitors can improve their apparent rank by running short favorable trials, using unusually pure feedstock, increasing scarce-metal loading, excluding deactivated batches, withholding failed recipes, or escalating synthesis and computation merely to remain competitive. Publication priority and polished peak results can therefore determine access to the demonstration award without establishing reproducibility, endurance, regeneration, resource efficiency, or manageable waste.","actors":["Research sponsor and program manager","Academic, nonprofit, and commercial nanocatalyst teams","Independent catalyst-validation laboratory","Conflict-screened technical judges","Environmental health and safety reviewers","Research technicians handling catalyst materials and reaction waste","Operator of the prospective demonstration system","Institutions guaranteeing entrant compliance and remediation","Independent protest reviewer"],"observable_state":"The suspected state is observable when rankings based on entrants' reported peak results differ from rankings based on complete time-series data, repeated preparations, variable feed conditions, or blinded endurance tests; failed batches and deactivation runs are absent from reports; scarce-metal, synthesis-batch, reactor-hour, compute, or waste inputs rise without entering the award metric; or nominally independent entries share undisclosed ownership, personnel, or reciprocal prize arrangements. Raw run histories, materials inventories, laboratory logs, compute accounts, waste records, submission disclosures, and validation results can test these indicators without presuming misconduct.","consequence":"The follow-on award may select a fragile catalyst whose headline result does not survive extended or variable operation. Rivalry can also produce redundant expenditure, conceal negative information needed to interpret nanoscale structure-performance relationships, shift waste and handling burdens to institutions, and narrow the field before distinct approaches have generated comparable evidence.","affected_objective":"Discover and validate a reproducible nanocatalyst that sustains the specified reaction performance under bounded material, energy, computation, safety, and waste conditions.","intervention":"Replace publication-priority selection with a preregistered, capped endurance prize. The sponsor states the target reaction and reserves one demonstration award, preceded by two milestone awards for independently valuable qualifying approaches. Before entrants are identified, a rulebook freezes eligibility, counted resources, common feed specifications, allowed catalyst-design freedom, prohibited conduct, safety gates, scoring, tie-breaks, confidentiality, audit, and appeal procedures. Eligible teams may use any declared nanostructure or synthesis route that passes existing safety review, but must register preparations, attempted batches, external contributors, counted cash and in-kind resources, reactor hours, accelerator-compute hours, scarce-element inputs, and waste disposition. Equal quantities of coded catalyst are sent through chain-of-custody to an independent laboratory. Public qualification tests establish basic competence, while undisclosed operating sequences test endurance, feed variation, restart behavior, and regeneration. Non-compensable safety and containment gates apply. Among passing entries, scoring combines repeated-preparation reproducibility, sustained conversion and selectivity, deactivation and recovery, scarce-material intensity, process energy, waste burden, and completeness of failure reporting. The resource cap limits the fuel of the race, while institutional guarantees secure specified cleanup and closeout duties. An audited leaderboard releases coarse standings without revealing hidden validation conditions. Fixed screens identify undisclosed common control, duplicated entries, reciprocal prize division, or suspicious submission coordination and refer anomalies to a separate inquiry. Published graduated penalties cover fabrication, sample substitution, concealed resources, interference, prohibited coordination, and unsafe shortcuts. The two milestone winners undergo audited confirmation; the demonstration award then goes to the highest qualifying endurance result. A post-contest review compares prize ranking with demonstration performance and reopens the award to a qualified challenger if the winner misses predeclared continuation conditions.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Rivalry purpose statement","domain_realization":"Use rivalry to discover durable, reproducible nanocatalyst performance under realistic constraints rather than to reward publication speed or a single peak result."},{"archetype_element":"Scarce prize or selection constraint","domain_realization":"One funded demonstration award, preceded by two bounded milestone awards that preserve evidence from distinct qualifying approaches."},{"archetype_element":"Competitor eligibility boundary","domain_realization":"Entrants must identify responsible institutions and contributors, register catalyst preparations, accept independent validation and resource accounting, pass applicable safety review, and provide a remediation guarantee."},{"archetype_element":"Contest arena boundary","domain_realization":"Teams may choose legitimate nanostructures and synthesis routes, but may not substitute samples, fabricate records, hide counted resources, interfere with competitors or validators, coordinate prize division, or bypass safety controls."},{"archetype_element":"Performance metric and scoring basis","domain_realization":"Coded entries are scored on repeated-preparation reproducibility, sustained conversion and selectivity, deactivation, restart and regeneration behavior, scarce-material intensity, energy, waste, and complete attempted-batch reporting."},{"archetype_element":"Fair process and due process layer","domain_realization":"Rules are frozen before entry, validation samples are coded, judges disclose conflicts, entrants receive an auditable score decomposition, and an independent reviewer hears time-boxed measurement and rule-application protests."},{"archetype_element":"Anti-sabotage and anti-collusion guardrail","domain_realization":"Chain-of-custody, contributor and ownership disclosures, common-control screens, logged communications, separate investigations, and graduated penalties cover tampering, sham independence, reciprocal prize allocation, and interference."},{"archetype_element":"Externality and spillover boundary","domain_realization":"Catalyst handling, scarce-element consumption, process energy, reaction waste, decontamination, and closeout obligations enter eligibility, scoring, monitoring, and the institutional remediation guarantee."},{"archetype_element":"Escalation and arms-race damper","domain_realization":"Registered caps cover funded and externally supplied development expenditure, synthesis batches, validation reactor hours, accelerator-compute hours, and submitted catalyst quantities."},{"archetype_element":"Prize decomposition or multiple-winner design","domain_realization":"Two milestone awards retain technically distinct qualified approaches before one candidate receives the costly demonstration award."},{"archetype_element":"Winner power and lock-in review","domain_realization":"Winning does not transfer control of future scoring, the independent test protocol, or shared validation data formats, and continuation depends on predeclared demonstration conditions."},{"archetype_element":"Learning and recalibration loop","domain_realization":"The sponsor compares contest scores with demonstration outcomes, resource use, harms, and participation effects before revising or retiring the next prize round."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"prize_challenge","role":"Posts a verifiable endurance goal and pays milestone or demonstration awards only after independent confirmation while leaving legitimate catalyst-design methods open.","counterfactual_removal":"Without an outcome-contingent prize, the sponsor would continue choosing mainly among promised work, publication signals, or investigator-selected results."},{"mechanism_slug":"contest_rulebook","role":"Freezes eligibility, resource accounting, testing, safety floors, scoring, confidentiality, fouls, tie-breaks, and appeals before entrant identities and results are known.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the rulebook, the sponsor or judges could adjust accepted evidence and weights after recognizing favored teams or catalyst families."},{"mechanism_slug":"spending_cap_or_resource_cap","role":"Caps the development inputs most likely to escalate competitively, including counted expenditure, batches, reactor time, compute, and submitted material.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the cap, rank could reflect the ability to finance repeated searches until a favorable catalyst appears rather than performance achieved within the intended resource envelope."},{"mechanism_slug":"ranked_leaderboard_with_audit","role":"Provides comparable coarse standings while withholding part of the operating sequence and auditing milestone leaders through repeated preparation and independent measurement.","counterfactual_removal":"Without held-back validation and leader audits, teams could tune to disclosed tests, submit exceptional specimens, or benefit from measurement artifacts."},{"mechanism_slug":"multiple_award_or_portfolio_selection","role":"Awards two qualifying milestones before the single demonstration down-select, choosing the second milestone for technically meaningful independence rather than redundant rank alone.","counterfactual_removal":"Without bounded milestone awards, one noisy early result could eliminate every alternative before endurance evidence is mature."},{"mechanism_slug":"externality_bond_or_liability_rule","role":"Uses an institutional guarantee to secure decontamination, waste disposition, and closeout duties associated with an entrant's materials and methods.","counterfactual_removal":"Without secured responsibility, a team could improve its position by shifting cleanup or disposal burdens to the validation laboratory or sponsor."},{"mechanism_slug":"anti_collusion_monitoring","role":"Applies uniform screens for undisclosed common control, duplicate entries, reciprocal prize allocation, and coordinated submission patterns, referring flags for separate investigation.","counterfactual_removal":"Without monitoring, nominally separate teams could divide milestone prizes or suppress genuine rivalry while appearing independently competitive."},{"mechanism_slug":"sabotage_or_foul_penalty_schedule","role":"Publishes graduated consequences for fabrication, sample substitution, concealed resources, interference, proven coordination, and unsafe shortcuts.","counterfactual_removal":"Without precommitted and consistently applied consequences, off-arena conduct could remain a viable way to improve rank."},{"mechanism_slug":"challenger_access_window","role":"Allows a qualified milestone winner to contest continuation if the demonstration winner misses predeclared endurance or operability conditions.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a reopening path, an initial victory could survive contradictory demonstration evidence merely because switching is inconvenient."},{"mechanism_slug":"post_contest_impact_review","role":"Tests whether the prize metrics predicted demonstration performance and examines harms, resource displacement, field concentration, and strategic adaptation before another round.","counterfactual_removal":"Without retrospective review, a gamed metric, ineffective cap, underestimated spillover, or winner-entrenching rule could persist."}],"causal_chain":["One follow-on demonstration award creates strategic dependence among teams seeking priority, funding, and validation.","A prize rulebook redirects that rivalry from publication timing toward a predeclared, independently verifiable endurance objective.","Registration of all preparations and attempted batches reduces the advantage from reporting only favorable catalyst specimens.","Resource caps make escalating synthesis, reactor use, computation, and external support unavailable as an unlimited route to rank.","Coded samples, hidden operating sequences, and repeated-preparation audits make sustained and reproducible performance more reliable winning strategies than tuning to a public benchmark.","Safety gates and secured cleanup duties prevent technical scores from compensating for prohibited hazards or exported closeout costs.","Milestone awards retain distinct qualified approaches while audited evidence accumulates for the single demonstration down-select.","Monitoring and graduated sanctions constrain sham independence, prize division, data fabrication, sample substitution, and interference without treating anomalies as verdicts.","Demonstration conditions, post-contest review, and a challenger path withdraw durable advantage when the initial score fails to predict the intended contribution."],"baseline":"The sponsor evaluates ordinary grant reports, publications, conference claims, and team-supplied peak-performance data, then makes a discretionary single-team follow-on award. Test conditions and resource inputs vary across teams, negative batches are not necessarily comparable, verification follows rather than governs selection, and publication priority can determine standing before endurance evidence exists.","nearest_rivals":["A conventional peer-reviewed grant competition: it can compare proposed methods and investigator records but purchases effort rather than independently verified achievement under common resource and endurance conditions.","An open catalyst leaderboard: it supplies a common metric but, without hidden tests, resource caps, safety floors, audits, and appeals, makes the visible score an easy target.","A direct award to the team with the highest published peak result: it is administratively simple but preserves selective-condition and short-duration incentives.","A cooperative research consortium: it may improve information sharing but does not resolve the scarce demonstration award or prevent dominant members from controlling validation and credit.","A safety or materials-handling standard: it protects a noncontestable floor but does not rank safe catalysts, dampen competitive spending, verify endurance, or preserve alternative approaches.","A patent-priority race: it establishes legal priority for claimed inventions but does not select for reproducible performance, lifecycle burden, or demonstration readiness."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The proposal's contrastive claim is structural rather than novel: when a sponsor deliberately retains rivalry to discover a demonstrable nanocatalyst, an outcome-contingent prize combined with bounded inputs, hidden endurance validation, failure accounting, spillover responsibility, multiple milestones, due process, and reopening keeps winning more closely coupled to durable contribution than publication priority, peak-result ranking, or any one guardrail alone.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The research sponsor may authorize a non-awarding retrospective shadow evaluation. Existing institutional safety authorities retain control over material handling, reaction testing, waste, and facilities; an independent reviewer controls protests; and only the sponsor's designated award authority may approve a future prize or demonstration commitment.","authorized_first_step":"Freeze a shadow rubric and apply it only to archived raw time series, preparation histories, materials inventories, compute and reactor-use records, waste records, and existing validation data; conduct no new synthesis, reaction, or material transfer.","excluded_actions":["Changing, withdrawing, or awarding research funding from the shadow ranking","Synthesizing, modifying, transferring, or reacting a nanomaterial for the first evidence step","Running new endurance, regeneration, toxicity, release, or scale-up experiments","Bypassing chemical, pressure-system, worker-safety, environmental, waste, or institutional review requirements","Treating anomaly-screen results as proof of collusion or misconduct","Publishing confidential recipes, unpublished results, personnel data, or identifiable resource accounts","Imposing penalties or collecting an institutional guarantee during the shadow evaluation","Allowing technical performance to compensate for failure of a safety gate"],"halt_rollback":"Stop if raw histories cannot distinguish attempted from selected runs, resource categories cannot be reconstructed consistently, confidential data cannot be segregated, catalyst families require incomparable reaction definitions, or evaluator conflicts cannot be resolved. Roll back by destroying provisional ranks, revoking temporary record access, leaving all awards unchanged, and documenting which missing observations made the shadow contest uninterpretable."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"The strongest counterevidence would show that reported peak rankings already predict repeated-preparation endurance, regeneration, and later demonstration performance; that teams disclose failed batches and relevant resource inputs comparably; and that resource escalation, exported cleanup burdens, sham independence, and priority-based selection do not alter award standing.","problem_falsifier":"The problem is falsified for the proposed setting if there is no scarce follow-on opportunity, teams' outcomes are not strategically interdependent, or the existing selection process already uses blinded endurance validation, complete attempt histories, bounded resources, safety floors, secured closeout duties, contestable judging, and credible reopening.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is falsified as a useful arena if endurance rankings are unstable across reasonable hidden operating sequences, validation variability dominates entrant differences, resource use cannot be defined or audited without arbitrary exclusions, milestone diversification yields no independently usable alternatives, or governance burdens consume the value of using rivalry.","risks":["Hidden operating sequences may test surprise rather than representative durability.","A composite score may obscure value judgments among activity, selectivity, endurance, material intensity, energy, and waste.","Resource caps may entrench teams that already own equipment, data, or precursor inventories.","Broad resource accounting may be intrusive, while narrow accounting may invite off-book displacement.","Complete failure reporting may expose confidential research paths or encourage relabeling of attempted batches.","Institutional guarantees may exclude otherwise capable teams without well-resourced sponsors.","Independent validation may damage or alter submitted nanoscale structures before measurement.","Anomaly screens may mistake shared collaborators or convergent methods for coordination.","Milestone splitting may leave each approach below the support needed for interpretable validation.","A challenger window may create churn after scale-up investment or become ceremonial if continuation thresholds are too permissive.","Pressure to win may migrate into uncapped publication, lobbying, or pre-registration activity." ]},"next_evidence_step":"Run one preregistered, non-awarding shadow challenge on a bounded set of archived projects. Before viewing team identities or historical funding decisions, freeze the eligibility rules, counted-resource definitions, safety exclusions, endurance metrics, missing-data treatment, milestone-diversity rule, audit triggers, and sensitivity analyses. Using only existing records, reconstruct complete preparation and run histories, separate peak from sustained results, calculate resource and waste accounts, and rank coded projects across held-back segments of archived time-series data. Test rank stability across plausible operating segments and weights, determine whether audits reverse apparent leaders, examine whether the cap favors incumbents, and record the cost of resolving a simulated appeal. The result authorizes only a decision about whether a prospective prize design merits safety and governance review.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Proposal 1 governed research-team competition for a scarce shared nanofabrication integration bay; its central path used common wafers, equal facility access, and blinded process replication to allocate existing infrastructure. This proposal instead governs a sponsor-created discovery prize for sustained nanocatalyst performance; its central path changes the payoff from publication priority to verified achievement and caps the resources fueling the research race. It neither allocates a nanofabrication bay nor modifies facility-access governance. Proposal 2 governed commercial vendors competing for a utility's nanomaterial water-treatment supply contract; its central path used lifecycle procurement, bid comparison, supplier liability, open interfaces, and a reserve source to constrain cost transfer and lock-in. This proposal does not purchase a product or select a utility supplier: it rewards a research milestone before procurement, uses experimental endurance and resource-bounded discovery as its arena, and treats a later demonstration award rather than a supply contract as the scarce prize. A research sponsor can adopt this proposal without adopting either facility-allocation rules or a utility tender, making it independently adoptable and not a feature, renamed variant, population change, or implementation detail of proposals 1 or 2.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Initial complete proposal at index 3","Materially different nanotechnology problem","Distinct prize-based intervention and causal path","Explicit diversity from proposals 1 and 2","Complete mechanism counterfactuals","Bounded authority and first evidence","Problem and intervention falsifiers"],"conceptual_changes":["Initial version; no parent proposal.","Located the rivalry in a sponsor-created nanocatalyst discovery race rather than infrastructure allocation or product procurement."],"operational_changes":["Specified an outcome-contingent, resource-capped endurance prize with two milestone awards and one demonstration award.","Restricted first evidence to a non-awarding retrospective shadow evaluation with no new nanomaterial activity."],"evidence_changes":["Prior art remains unsearched and no external evidence was used.","Defined bounded tests of ranking stability, resource-accounting feasibility, audit reversals, incumbent advantage, and appeal burden."],"claim_changes":["Claims remain conditional and testable, with no assertion of novelty, prevalence, demand, or effect size."]}}