{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp06_four_proposal_generalization60_20260803","cell_id":"bounded_rivalry_governance__sociology_anthropology","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"brg_sa_community_fieldwork_access_arena_v0","proposal_index":1,"version":0,"title":"Community-Governed Fieldwork Access Arena","problem":"At a university field station serving one resettlement neighborhood, several anthropology and sociology teams compete each semester for two institution-funded placements, 120 hours of liaison support, and permission to recruit through shared community venues. Teams can improve their chances by cultivating exclusive gatekeepers, approaching residents before selection, escalating honoraria, understating participant burden, or informally dividing topics and populations with other laboratories. Ethics approval evaluates each study separately but does not govern these strategic interactions or the cumulative burden imposed by the contest.","actors":["Applicant fieldwork teams","Current placement holders and repeat principal investigators","Field-station director and liaison staff","Neighborhood research council representing varied resident groups","Prospective participants and nonparticipating residents exposed to recruitment","Independent ethnographic-methods reviewers","University research-ethics office","Independent appeal reviewer"],"observable_state":"Application files, liaison calendars, recruitment logs, honorarium schedules, reviewer disclosures, and resident complaints show whether teams seek the same venues or households, exceed declared contact demands, secure exclusivity from gatekeepers, exchange reciprocal reviewer support, submit nominal cover applications, or repeatedly rotate placements among the same laboratories. The immediate trigger is that qualified requests collectively exceed the two placements and 120 liaison hours controlled by the institution.","consequence":"Winning can reflect access capture, resource escalation, burden shifting, or coordinated turf division rather than methodological fit and responsible field relationships. Residents may receive duplicative requests or become dependent on a single gatekeeper, while resulting samples and interpretations become systematically shaped by who controlled access.","affected_objective":"Produce credible, plural ethnographic evidence while preserving voluntary participation, limiting cumulative community burden, and preventing an institution-sponsored placement from becoming durable control over a field site.","intervention":"Pilot a single-semester bounded contest for the two placements. Before applications are known, the field station and neighborhood research council publish and freeze a rulebook defining the purpose, eligibility, shared burden ceiling, allowed pre-award consultation, prohibited exclusivity and participant recruitment, evidence requirements, scoring rubric, conflicts process, and appeal route. Eligible teams receive identical liaison time, presentation time, and application space. A methods panel scores question-method fit, feasibility, reflexive sampling safeguards, and evidence stewardship; the neighborhood council scores anticipated burden, accessibility of consent and refusal, and return-of-results commitments without judging scholarly orthodoxy. Selection is portfolio-based: the two awards must be individually qualified and collectively nonredundant. A fixed portion of each institutional award is retained for translation, participant notification, data return, or remediation if specified obligations are not completed. Cross-cycle application and contact patterns are screened uniformly for possible reciprocal scoring, cover applications, or placement rotation, but flags only trigger independent inquiry. Graduated penalties apply to verified pre-recruitment, deception, exclusivity, retaliation, collusion, or concealed burden. Placements expire after one semester, incumbents receive no automatic renewal, and realized burden, methodological delivery, complaints, concentration, and unanticipated harms are reviewed before another cycle.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Rivalry purpose statement","domain_realization":"Use comparative pressure to select fieldwork designs that are methodologically defensible and compatible with the community's finite hosting capacity."},{"archetype_element":"Scarce prize or selection constraint","domain_realization":"Two institution-funded semester placements and 120 hours of field-station liaison support."},{"archetype_element":"Competitor eligibility boundary","domain_realization":"Teams must pass ethics prereview, disclose conflicts and existing site relationships, demonstrate relevant competence, and accept common consent, burden, and data-return conditions."},{"archetype_element":"Contest arena boundary","domain_realization":"Teams may improve and defend standardized proposals and undertake bounded, logged consultation; they may not recruit participants before award, purchase exclusivity, retaliate, conceal contacts, disparage rivals to residents, or coordinate nominal competition."},{"archetype_element":"Performance metric and scoring basis","domain_realization":"Separate published scores cover methodological fit, feasibility, sampling safeguards, cumulative burden, accessible consent and refusal, stewardship, and portfolio complementarity; no single proxy determines the result."},{"archetype_element":"Fair process and due process layer","domain_realization":"Rules are frozen before identities are revealed, reviewer conflicts are disclosed, written reasons are issued, and applicants may challenge factual or procedural errors through an independent time-boxed appeal."},{"archetype_element":"Anti-sabotage and anti-collusion guardrail","domain_realization":"Uniform log-based screens refer suspicious cross-cycle patterns for inquiry, while verified exclusivity, retaliation, cover applications, reciprocal scoring, or placement rotation receive predeclared graduated sanctions."},{"archetype_element":"Externality and spillover boundary","domain_realization":"A shared contact ledger, cumulative liaison-hour ceiling, resident complaint channel, and retained remediation funds keep recruitment and follow-up burdens inside the decision calculus."},{"archetype_element":"Escalation and arms-race damper","domain_realization":"Identical application length, presentation time, liaison access, and prohibited pre-award recruitment prevent established teams from winning through larger outreach budgets or deeper institutional staffing."},{"archetype_element":"Winner power and lock-in review","domain_realization":"Awards expire, create no ownership of relationships or topics, require return of shared access information, and reopen to qualified challengers each semester."},{"archetype_element":"Learning and recalibration loop","domain_realization":"A precommitted post-placement review compares realized conduct and community burden with the contest's stated purpose and can revise or retire the next contest."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"contest_rulebook","role":"Freezes eligibility, legal moves, scoring, conflicts, tie-breaks, and appeals before applicant identities and strategies are known.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, panels and gatekeepers could change expectations after seeing applicants, making favoritism and selective enforcement indistinguishable from merit."},{"mechanism_slug":"multiple_award_or_portfolio_selection","role":"Selects two qualified but complementary studies rather than treating the top two isolated scores as an automatically desirable set.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, both awards could concentrate access in one network or duplicate the same population and burden while excluding a distinct qualified approach."},{"mechanism_slug":"spending_cap_or_resource_cap","role":"Equalizes application space, presentation time, liaison assistance, and permitted pre-award contact so competition turns on the proposed contribution rather than laboratory capacity.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, teams could escalate staff effort, gifts, honoraria, and relationship cultivation merely to avoid losing position."},{"mechanism_slug":"externality_bond_or_liability_rule","role":"Retains part of the institutional award to fund specified translation, notification, data-return, or remediation duties when fieldwork burdens materialize.","counterfactual_removal":"Without secured remediation, a team could finish or leave while residents and liaison staff absorb unfunded follow-up costs."},{"mechanism_slug":"anti_collusion_monitoring","role":"Applies fixed cross-cycle screens to cover applications, reciprocal scoring, stable laboratory rotations, and coordinated topic partitioning, referring anomalies to an independent inquiry rather than treating them as proof.","counterfactual_removal":"Without cross-round observation, a coordinated field could appear competitive in every individual cycle while quietly preserving incumbents' territories."},{"mechanism_slug":"sabotage_or_foul_penalty_schedule","role":"Attaches published, graduated consequences to verified deception, retaliation, exclusivity, concealed recruitment, collusion, and repeated burden violations.","counterfactual_removal":"Without enforceable consequences, prohibited conduct could remain a profitable route to a placement whenever detection is imperfect."},{"mechanism_slug":"challenger_access_window","role":"Expires placements and reopens qualification each semester, with no incumbent presumption beyond a disclosed continuity consideration.","counterfactual_removal":"Without reopening, a successful team could convert temporary selection into durable control of liaison channels, venues, and participant networks."},{"mechanism_slug":"post_contest_impact_review","role":"Tests whether selected teams delivered the intended methodological and community value, traces spillovers, and changes or retires the next cycle's rules.","counterfactual_removal":"Without ex-post review, a gamed rubric or harmful access pattern could be repeated because compliance at selection time would be mistaken for success."}],"causal_chain":["Institution-controlled placements and liaison hours remain scarce, so qualified teams retain reason to outperform one another.","A frozen rulebook makes the intended contribution, legal strategy set, judging roles, and appeal path common knowledge before teams act.","Eligibility checks remove unsafe or sham entrants without allowing incumbency alone to qualify a team.","Resource caps and bans on pre-award recruitment reduce the advantage obtainable through spending escalation, gatekeeper capture, and participant preemption.","Multi-criterion judging makes methodological fit and bounded community burden necessary routes to a competitive score.","Portfolio selection awards scarce access to individually qualified, collectively nonredundant designs, limiting concentration without eliminating comparison.","Monitoring, inquiry, and graduated sanctions raise the expected cost of sabotage, concealed burden, and collusive pseudo-competition while preserving a presumption against guilt from patterns alone.","Expiring awards, secured remediation duties, and post-contest review prevent a win from becoming permanent control and feed observed gaming or harm into redesign."],"baseline":"The field station handles requests through a combination of first-come scheduling, principal-investigator relationships, standalone ethics approval, and discretionary negotiation by liaison staff. Each project is assessed separately; no common contest purpose, cumulative burden budget, portfolio criterion, cross-cycle collusion screen, appeal path, or expiration rule governs rivalry among teams.","nearest_rivals":["A noncompetitive queue or rotating entitlement: it could distribute placements transparently and suppress strategic rivalry, but it would not use comparative selection to distinguish proposals when hosting capacity is scarce.","A weighted lottery among ethics-qualified teams: it could reduce favoritism and proposal-polish advantages, but it would deliberately give up selection for methodological fit, burden management, and portfolio complementarity beyond the qualification floor.","Centralized community-contact scheduling plus ordinary ethics review: it directly addresses duplicated recruitment and cumulative burden and may be sufficient if strategic efforts to capture selection are not causing the observed harms.","Participatory agenda setting followed by consensus appointment: it gives residents stronger substantive control and may be preferable where collaboration, rather than rivalry, is the legitimate organizing principle.","Constrained resource allocation by an administrative committee: it can divide liaison hours and placements, but it does not by itself specify competitive moves, anti-collusion controls, appeals, escalation limits, or how winners are prevented from capturing future rounds."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The proposal's remaining contrast is conditional: when fieldwork teams strategically interact to win scarce institution-sponsored access, governing eligibility, moves, comparative scoring, abuse, spillovers, and reopening as one arena may keep the route to selection coupled to responsible ethnographic contribution. If scheduling, qualification, lottery, or collaborative agenda setting resolves the observed state without retaining rivalry, this contrast does not hold.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The university may govern its funding, staff time, venues, and institutional sponsorship; the neighborhood research council may accept or reject collective hosting arrangements within its recognized scope; each resident retains independent and continuing authority to consent, refuse, or withdraw. Neither the award panel nor the council can grant access to a person, household, private record, or restricted cultural knowledge.","authorized_first_step":"Run a tabletop exercise using synthetic applications and invented contact logs, with applicant identities removed, to test the rubric, portfolio choice, planted gaming routes, reviewer conflicts, inquiry handoff, appeal procedure, and administrative burden before any live placement is affected.","excluded_actions":["Treating residents, consent, cultural knowledge, or private spaces as the prize being allocated","Recruiting or contacting prospective participants during the tabletop","Overriding individual refusal or withdrawal through a collective approval","Publishing applicant or resident rankings","Inferring collusion, misconduct, or guilt from an anomaly screen without independent inquiry","Changing rules after applications are revealed","Granting permanent topic ownership, territorial exclusivity, or privileged future eligibility to a winner","Withholding ordinary ethics protections from teams or residents who decline the pilot"],"halt_rollback":"Halt before live use if community representatives reject the arena, synthetic cases reveal identity-sensitive or readily gamed outcomes, reviewers cannot apply role boundaries, or the appeal and inquiry functions lack independence. Discard synthetic identities and scores, preserve existing placements, and revert to ordinary ethics review and centralized scheduling while redesigning or retiring the contest."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"The strongest counterevidence would be process records showing that overlapping recruitment, gatekeeper exclusivity, burden concealment, reciprocal scoring, and incumbent persistence do not occur, or that resident burden and evidentiary distortion arise chiefly from the number and content of studies regardless of whether teams compete for placements.","problem_falsifier":"The problem pattern is falsified if there is no scarce institution-controlled prize, qualified teams do not affect one another's prospects through strategic action, or the desired work requires joint agenda formation such that defeating rivals is illegitimate rather than useful.","intervention_falsifier":"Do not advance beyond the tabletop if blinded evaluators cannot apply the rules consistently, planted off-arena strategies remain advantageous, nominally irrelevant applicant identities change selections, the portfolio rule merely disguises favored choices, anomaly screens are treated as verdicts, or the process consumes more liaison and community-review capacity than the scheduling conflict it is meant to govern. In live use, suspend the arena if verified burden, complaints, access concentration, or sampling distortion move adversely relative to the documented baseline while rule compliance appears satisfactory.","risks":["A small neighborhood council could become a new gatekeeper or underrepresent less visible residents.","Published criteria could produce polished compliance narratives while shifting gaming into unlogged relationships.","Resource caps could favor incumbents that already possess site knowledge and infrastructure.","Portfolio complementarity could become an opaque justification for passing over higher-scoring applicants.","Monitoring reciprocal ties could mistake ordinary scholarly collaboration or shared constraints for collusion.","Retained funds could be too small, released too early, or treated as permission to impose harm.","Frequent reopening could weaken continuity and trust needed for longitudinal ethnography.","The added process could burden residents, liaison staff, and small research teams more than large laboratories.","Formal competition could crowd out legitimate cooperation, shared learning, or community-led research questions."]},"next_evidence_step":"Conduct one bounded tabletop with 8–12 synthetic applications, including predeclared cases of duplicated burden, incumbent advantage, complementary methods, a cover application, reciprocal scoring, and an innocent parallel pattern. Have separate community, methods, ethics, and appeal roles apply the frozen rules twice with identities permuted. Record selection stability, planted-strategy detection and false referrals, role-boundary violations, appeal reversals, award concentration, and reviewer time. Use the results only to decide whether a small, separately consented live pilot is warranted.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Not applicable within this sealed first-proposal task; no other proposal was consulted or developed.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":[],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}