{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp06_four_proposal_generalization60_20260803","cell_id":"bounded_rivalry_governance__religious_studies_theology","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"brg-rst-preservation-reverse-auction-04","proposal_index":4,"version":0,"title":"Externality-Adjusted Reverse Auction for Religious-Collection Preservation","problem":"A library consortium with a mobile preservation laboratory has fewer lab weeks and less subsidy than eligible custodians request for fragile religious manuscripts, recordings, ritual objects, and community archives. Custodians therefore compete for a scarce preservation opportunity. In a narrative grant process, applicants can improve their position by inflating item counts or urgency, understating preparation and long-term storage costs, postponing cultural-permission questions, proposing proprietary workflows, disparaging rival collections, or submitting coordinated cover bids. A nominally inexpensive project can win by shifting conservation, rights, metadata, community-consultation, and digital-maintenance costs to custodians or future repositories.","actors":["Custodian institutions and community archives seeking preservation support","Individuals or communities holding cultural, religious, or intellectual authority over materials","The library consortium allocating mobile-lab weeks and subsidies","Conservators, digitization technicians, and metadata specialists","Institutional sponsors guaranteeing project obligations","Independent condition, rights, and cultural-protocol reviewers","Repository and digital-preservation operators","Researchers and community users affected by future access conditions","Qualified custodians not selected in the current cycle"],"observable_state":"Across completed allocation cycles, records can be examined for requested lab weeks exceeding capacity; incomparable estimates of items, formats, and condition; winning bids followed by change orders or unbudgeted preparation; rights or cultural restrictions discovered only after selection; deferred metadata and storage obligations; repeated bid rotation or stable shares among custodians or service partners; cover bids clustered above winners; unsupported claims about rival collections; concentration of awards in institutions already owning compatible infrastructure; proprietary outputs; and preserved files that later become unreadable, inaccessible to their custodians, or dependent on the winning provider.","consequence":"Scarce preservation capacity may be awarded to projects that appear cheap only because they externalize risk and lifecycle costs, while vulnerable materials wait, custodians or communities absorb remediation burdens, price discovery becomes unreliable, and selected institutions or providers gain control over infrastructure needed in later rounds.","affected_objective":"Allocate a fixed supply of preservation-lab time and subsidy to authorized, technically feasible projects at a defensible full lifecycle cost, while respecting custodial authority, cultural restrictions, material safety, portfolio resilience, and future contestability.","intervention":"Divide the annual preservation capacity into comparable lots by material type, condition tier, and standard unit of verified work. Before bidding, independent reviewers establish custodian authority, cultural permissions, minimum conservation safeguards, required metadata, approved access restrictions, storage commitments, and a noncontestable safety floor. Eligible custodians submit sealed reverse bids stating the minimum subsidy required per verified unit, including preparation, conservation, digitization, return copies, metadata, and a defined preservation period. A fixed externality schedule adds standardized reserves for handling risk, unresolved dependencies, migration burden, and remediation exposure; culturally required access restrictions are not treated as penalties. Lots clear to the lowest externality-adjusted eligible bids, subject to per-institution concentration limits and a portfolio check for correlated formats, storage dependencies, and catastrophic-loss exposure. Bid inputs and finalist capabilities are audited before award. Sponsors secure remediation obligations, outputs use transferable preservation formats under custodian-defined access controls, and unsuccessful entrants receive reasons and a scheduled rebid window. Cross-round screens refer suspicious bid patterns for independent inquiry, while post-project review recalibrates units, reserves, eligibility, and lot design.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Rivalry purpose statement","domain_realization":"Use competition to reveal the subsidy required to complete comparable preservation work rather than asking a panel to infer every custodian's costs."},{"archetype_element":"Scarce prize or selection constraint","domain_realization":"A fixed annual quantity of mobile-laboratory weeks, specialist labor, equipment time, and preservation subsidy."},{"archetype_element":"Competitor eligibility boundary","domain_realization":"A bidder must document custodial authority, relevant community or rights permissions, a condition survey, technical feasibility, storage capacity, conflicts, and institutional or pooled sponsor accountability."},{"archetype_element":"Protected noncontestable floor","domain_realization":"Custodial refusal, sacred or restricted status, community authority, material safety, privacy, copyright, and culturally required access controls cannot be overridden by price or consortium preference."},{"archetype_element":"Contest arena boundary","domain_realization":"Custodians may compete through sealed cost bids and standardized technical evidence. False provenance, inflated quantities, concealed dependencies, interference with rival condition surveys, private signaling, cover bids, and unsupported disparagement are prohibited."},{"archetype_element":"Performance metric and scoring basis","domain_realization":"Within comparable eligible lots, selection follows audited externality-adjusted subsidy per verified preservation unit, followed by a portfolio check for concentration and shared failure dependencies."},{"archetype_element":"Fair process and due process","domain_realization":"Lot definitions, units, eligibility, adjustment schedules, concentration limits, payment rules, tie-breaks, conflicts, audit methods, reasons, and procedural appeals are fixed before bids open."},{"archetype_element":"Anti-sabotage and anti-collusion guardrail","domain_realization":"Sealed bids, common communications, relationship disclosure, consistent anomaly screens, audit trails, and graduated responses constrain signaling, bid rotation, cover bids, and attacks on rival eligibility."},{"archetype_element":"Externality and spillover boundary","domain_realization":"Adjusted bids include preparation, handling, metadata, return, storage, migration, correction, and remediation obligations instead of allowing those costs to fall outside the award decision."},{"archetype_element":"Escalation and arms-race damper","domain_realization":"Standard bid templates, evidence limits, verified work units, and per-institution award ceilings prevent advantage through grant-production volume or capture of all available lab capacity."},{"archetype_element":"Winner power and lock-in review","domain_realization":"Transferable preservation formats, custodian-controlled access rules, documented workflows, concentration limits, and review of exclusive technical dependencies prevent a current award from controlling future preservation rounds."},{"archetype_element":"Learning and recalibration loop","domain_realization":"Realized costs, damage, change orders, storage performance, access compliance, and provider concentration update the next cycle's work units, reserves, eligibility, and lot structure."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"auction_with_eligibility_and_externality_rules","role":"Uses sealed reverse bids to discover the requested subsidy for standardized preservation work, admitting only authorized and feasible projects and adding declared lifecycle and harm reserves before clearing lots.","counterfactual_removal":"Without price discovery, selectors must infer costs from narrative proposals; without eligibility and externality adjustments, the cheapest apparent bid could win by omitting permissions, safety, metadata, storage, or remediation."},{"mechanism_slug":"contest_rulebook","role":"Freezes comparable lots, work units, payment rules, eligibility, adjustment schedules, concentration limits, prohibited conduct, tie-breaks, audits, and appeals before identities and bids are evaluated.","counterfactual_removal":"Without precommitted terms, the consortium could redefine units or waive safeguards after seeing which custodian benefits, making prices incomparable and outcomes contestable only through influence."},{"mechanism_slug":"externality_bond_or_liability_rule","role":"Requires an institutional sponsor or equally available pooled guarantee to secure specified damage, privacy, metadata, return, migration, and correction obligations before lab work begins.","counterfactual_removal":"Without secured responsibility, a low-bidding project could exhaust its award or dissolve before delayed damage and maintenance costs appear, leaving custodians to fund remediation."},{"mechanism_slug":"anti_collusion_monitoring","role":"Applies fixed cross-round screens to bid rotation, stable award shares, clustered cover bids, synchronized withdrawals, common bid language, and undisclosed service-provider relationships, referring anomalies rather than judging intent.","counterfactual_removal":"Without cross-round screening, coordinated bidders could simulate price competition; if the screen issued verdicts, similar costs or shared technical constraints could generate false accusations."},{"mechanism_slug":"sabotage_or_foul_penalty_schedule","role":"Defines graduated responses to fabricated eligibility objections, interference with surveys or schedules, concealed dependencies, bid signaling, false quantities, unauthorized handling, and repeated noncompliance.","counterfactual_removal":"Without known consequences, weakening a rival's eligibility or concealing costs could remain cheaper than submitting a more accurate bid."},{"mechanism_slug":"multiple_award_or_portfolio_selection","role":"Allocates several lots while limiting institutional concentration and correlated storage or format dependencies, preserving cost competition without creating one dominant preservation pathway.","counterfactual_removal":"Without portfolio selection, individually economical bids could place all materials, expertise, or future migration obligations in one institution or technical stack."},{"mechanism_slug":"ranked_leaderboard_with_audit","role":"Produces a criterion-level award order from adjusted sealed bids and audits the leading bidders' quantities, capabilities, permissions, and cost inputs before final selection; standings become visible only after award.","counterfactual_removal":"Without finalist audit, inflated work units or omitted dependencies could manufacture the lowest adjusted price; a live public board would instead facilitate signaling and tactical underbidding."},{"mechanism_slug":"challenger_access_window","role":"Schedules recurring lots and permits unsuccessful qualified custodians to rebid under recalibrated units without maintaining a continuously costly application process.","counterfactual_removal":"Without reopening, an initial winner's infrastructure advantage could become indefinite; permanently open bidding would impose continual proposal and review costs."},{"mechanism_slug":"antitrust_or_competition_review","role":"Checks whether an award creates exclusive control over preservation equipment, formats, storage, or migration services needed for future contests and requires transferable workflows or access where authority permits.","counterfactual_removal":"Without winner-power review, a low bid could be an entry strategy for creating a proprietary dependency that raises later costs and forecloses challengers."},{"mechanism_slug":"post_contest_impact_review","role":"Compares bid assumptions with realized conservation quality, change orders, damage, metadata completion, storage performance, community restrictions, concentration, and total lifecycle cost before redesigning the next auction.","counterfactual_removal":"Without retrospective review, inaccurate work units, inadequate reserves, or lock-in could persist because the initial clearing price would be mistaken for successful preservation."}],"causal_chain":["Custodians seek more preservation-lab time and subsidy than the consortium can supply, so one project's allocation reduces the opportunity available to others.","Because bids affect selection, custodians can benefit from understating lifecycle costs, overstating standardized output, shifting risks outside the bid, attacking rival eligibility, coordinating cover bids, or building dependencies that improve their position in later rounds.","Narrative grant review can compare significance and urgency but does not necessarily reveal the minimum subsidy required for comparable work or make omitted future costs part of the winning price.","Comparable lots, verified work units, eligibility floors, sealed reverse bids, and fixed externality reserves make audited full-cost delivery the principal route to winning.","Uniform monitoring, finalist audits, foul penalties, and secured remediation reduce the reliability of coordination, quantity inflation, hidden dependencies, and cost dumping.","Multiple lots and concentration limits preserve several preservation pathways, while transferable formats and winner-power review prevent an economical current bid from purchasing future control.","Post-project evidence recalibrates units and reserves; challenger windows then reopen the field, preserving price discipline only while it remains coupled to safe, authorized, maintainable preservation."],"baseline":"The baseline is a narrative preservation-grant competition in which custodians describe significance, urgency, outputs, and requested budgets in heterogeneous formats. An expert panel ranks proposals holistically, but preparation, permissions, metadata, storage, migration, and remediation assumptions may not be comparable; requested subsidy does not reveal a standardized unit price; cumulative technical concentration is reviewed informally; and realized lifecycle costs do not automatically revise subsequent selection rules.","nearest_rivals":["Expert need-and-significance panel: can exercise contextual judgment about irreplaceability and urgency but may have weak cost discovery and limited protection against narrative advantage or omitted lifecycle burdens.","First-come allocation of mobile-lab time: is simple and predictable but rewards application timing rather than urgency, full cost, safety, or portfolio resilience.","Formula allocation by collection size or institutional membership: reduces discretion but can reward inflated quantities, ignore condition and cultural authority, and preserve incumbent shares.","A lottery among technically eligible projects: limits favoritism and strategic pricing but does not reveal subsidy requirements or select a portfolio within the available budget.","Centralized consortium acquisition and preservation: can capture scale economies but transfers control away from custodians and may be unsuitable for materials that cannot leave their communities or institutions."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The intervention is justified only where preservation projects can be grouped into genuinely comparable work lots, eligible custodians face a common scarce subsidy or lab resource, strategic bidding affects allocation, and lifecycle externalities can be specified without pricing away cultural authority. If urgency and uniqueness defeat comparison, costs cannot be audited, custody cannot be protected, or preservation is a noncontestable obligation, expert allocation or direct provision should replace the auction.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"Custodians and relevant communities retain authority over whether materials may be examined, moved, treated, digitized, described, stored, or accessed. The consortium controls only its laboratory capacity and subsidy. Conservators retain stop-work authority for material safety, and applicable ethics, copyright, privacy, cultural-property, and institutional bodies retain their existing jurisdictions.","authorized_first_step":"Using only authorized administrative and technical records, conduct a read-only retrospective cost reconstruction for no more than ten completed preservation projects. Define common work units by format and treatment type, then compare proposed and realized preparation, lab, metadata, return, storage, migration, change-order, and remediation inputs. Do not inspect restricted materials, reopen permissions, or recalculate live awards.","excluded_actions":["Handling, opening, imaging, translating, or describing collection materials during the first evidence step","Treating a low bid as permission to preserve or disclose materials","Overriding custodial, community, cultural, privacy, copyright, or conservation restrictions","Ranking religions, traditions, communities, or collections by intrinsic worth","Changing current awards, access conditions, employment, custody, or vendor contracts","Publishing bidder-level suspicions or treating anomaly screens as proof of coordination","Forcing open access or standardized metadata where authorized cultural controls prohibit them","Requiring personal cash bonds from under-resourced custodians when an equally accountable pooled or institutional guarantee is unavailable","Mandating transfer of restricted content as an interoperability remedy"],"halt_rollback":"Stop if comparable units cannot be constructed without exposing protected information, cost records are unauthorized, custodial authority is disputed, cultural restrictions would be encoded as negative value, or retrospective estimates begin affecting live preservation decisions. Remove bidder and collection identifiers, issue no award ranking or collusion inference, preserve only authorized aggregates, and return any prospective auction to custodian, conservation, legal, and community review."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"Existing allocation records already use comparable full-lifecycle estimates, authorized cultural and safety floors, auditable quantities, secured remediation, low concentration, transferable technical outputs, and documented post-project recalibration; realized costs closely follow proposals, and no meaningful underbidding, bid coordination, cost dumping, or winner lock-in is observable.","problem_falsifier":"The problem is falsified if lab time and subsidy are not scarce, custodians' outcomes are not strategically interdependent, projects cannot be grouped into comparable units, requested funds do not respond to selection incentives, or award differences are adequately explained by transparent urgency and conservation constraints without gaming, collusion, externalization, or lock-in.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is disfavored if retrospective reconstruction or an authorized paper auction shows that bids do not predict realized full costs, externality adjustments require enough discretionary judgment to erase price discovery, comparable lots systematically exclude fragile or culturally governed collections, pooled guarantees fail to secure remediation, or auction selection produces greater concentration, damage, stranded outputs, or lifecycle cost than expert allocation.","risks":["Standard work units could erase collection-specific conservation needs.","Strategic underbidding could produce later change orders or incomplete treatment.","Well-resourced institutions may bid lower because they already possess subsidized infrastructure.","Guarantee requirements could exclude small community archives despite pooled options.","Externality schedules could mistakenly treat culturally required restrictions as inefficiencies.","Publishing award order could expose sensitive facts about collections or facilitate later coordination.","Portfolio limits could delay an unusually urgent large collection.","Concentration review could be misused to penalize competent custodians merely for prior success.","Transferability requirements could conflict with community control or restricted knowledge.","Audits and proposal preparation could consume scarce preservation labor.","Post-project review cannot reverse physical damage or unauthorized disclosure." ]},"next_evidence_step":"With custodian and records-owner authorization, select up to ten closed preservation projects spanning no more than three predefined format-and-treatment categories. Before examining award outcomes, preregister candidate work units, lifecycle cost fields, externality categories, alternative explanations, and criteria for declaring projects incomparable. Two conservation-cost reviewers independently reconstruct proposed and realized inputs from existing records, reconcile differences, and test whether an adjusted reverse-bid ordering could have been calculated without exposing restricted information or changing cultural constraints. Compare that paper ordering with the actual narrative-panel decisions and with first-come, formula, and lottery baselines. The bounded output is a go/no-go recommendation for a nonbinding sealed-bid simulation, not a live allocation or finding about any custodian.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Proposal 1 governs faculty competition for introductory-course module slots. Its selected object is a teaching module, its objective is pedagogical portfolio quality, and its causal path uses rubric scoring, preparation caps, and curricular rotation. Proposal 4 instead allocates preservation-lab capacity and subsidy among collection custodians through cost revelation, lifecycle externality adjustment, secured remediation, and technical anti-lock-in controls; it requires no course or teaching decision. Proposal 2 governs rival interpretations of one textual or historical proposition through head-to-head evidential stress tests, source audits, and an expiring reference designation. Proposal 4 does not compare interpretations or designate a scholarly account: eligible projects may preserve unrelated collections, and bids concern auditable delivery costs rather than truth-supporting evidence. Proposal 3 governs researchers competing for community-facilitated fieldwork access, with participant burden and consent as its central constraints. Proposal 4 instead governs custodians competing to receive preservation infrastructure for materials they already lawfully control; it involves no participant recruitment or allocation of researcher access. Its distinct causal route is a sealed reverse auction that reveals minimum requested subsidy and internalizes conservation and maintenance costs, rather than an RFP portfolio built around cumulative human-participant burden.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":[],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}