{"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_reversible_archive_custody_v0","proposal_index":2,"version":0,"title":"Reversible Custody Contest for Ethnographic Archives","problem":"An anthropology consortium must assign a five-year custody mandate and preservation endowment for a finite collection of interviews, field notes, images, and community-governed metadata. Candidate repositories can improve their chances by offering temporarily low prices while excluding migration costs, promising depositors proprietary services, concealing dependence on closed formats, lobbying collection gatekeepers, or coordinating with other repositories to divide future custody mandates. A conventional repository review can identify minimum competence without testing whether the winning institution can execute cultural access rules, return records, survive service interruption, or transfer the collection without obstructive lock-in.","actors":["Anthropology consortium that controls the preservation endowment","Individuals and research teams that deposited records","Source-community data-governance council","Candidate university, public, and nonprofit repositories","Archivists and digital-preservation specialists","Independent security and cultural-protocol auditors","Authorized researchers and community users","Independent bid-protest reviewer","Future custodian or recovery repository"],"observable_state":"Before placement, bid documents, prototype trials, pricing schedules, format inventories, subcontractor disclosures, migration plans, lobbying contacts, and cross-round bidding patterns reveal whether repositories omit exit costs, require exclusive licenses, rely on nonexportable metadata, offer nominal cover bids, rotate collection categories, or make stewardship promises they cannot reproduce in a controlled trial. The trigger is that several qualified repositories pursue one primary mandate and a limited preservation endowment while their choices affect the future contestability of custody.","consequence":"The selected repository can win on visible acquisition terms while shifting preservation, access, cultural-protocol, and migration costs to depositors, source communities, or a future custodian. Once records, identifiers, and user relationships accumulate in a closed system, the winner may acquire control over future access and selection rules unrelated to preservation quality.","affected_objective":"Preserve ethnographic records, execute legitimate access and withdrawal rules, maintain usable provenance, and keep custody transferable without converting archival stewardship into ownership of people’s accounts or durable control of the research field.","intervention":"Run a bounded, staged custody contest using a synthetic and permission-cleared test corpus before transferring any restricted records. The consortium and source-community council freeze a rulebook covering eligibility, permitted outreach, conflicts, bid format, cultural-protocol scenarios, scoring, disqualification, audit, and appeal. Each qualified repository receives the same test package, clarification channel, prototype period, and demonstration time. Repositories must ingest the package, preserve provenance, enforce simulated embargo and withdrawal instructions, recover from a staged service interruption, produce an accessible copy, and export a complete standards-documented package to a neutral recovery environment. Published component scores cover preservation integrity, faithful protocol execution, authorized usability, incident recovery, total lifecycle cost, and verified exit performance; final claims are audited against held-out cases. The endowment supports a primary custodian and an organizationally independent recovery copy selected as a complementary portfolio rather than naming one permanent winner. A fixed transition reserve is withheld until successful export, documentation, and deletion or retention instructions are independently verified. Cross-round screens can refer suspicious bid rotation, cover bids, or category partitioning for inquiry but cannot establish misconduct alone. Custody conveys no intellectual-property claim or authority to change access rules, expires after five years, and includes a midterm challenger window if published service or portability conditions fail. Annual impact reviews can revise or retire the next contest.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Rivalry purpose statement","domain_realization":"Use comparison among repositories to discover verifiable preservation, protocol-execution, recovery, and portability capability rather than merely the most attractive acquisition promise."},{"archetype_element":"Scarce prize or selection constraint","domain_realization":"A five-year primary-custody mandate, one independently held recovery-copy mandate, and a finite preservation endowment."},{"archetype_element":"Competitor eligibility boundary","domain_realization":"Repositories must demonstrate lawful custody capacity, financial continuity, security controls, preservation competence, conflict disclosure, cultural-protocol capability, and acceptance of portability and audit obligations."},{"archetype_element":"Contest arena boundary","domain_realization":"Repositories may compete through standardized bids and controlled demonstrations; they may not seek exclusive depositor commitments, contact restricted record subjects, disparage rivals to source communities, conceal subcontractors, coordinate bids, or condition export on a new discretionary fee."},{"archetype_element":"Performance metric and scoring basis","domain_realization":"Scoring combines verified preservation integrity, access-rule fidelity, usability, incident recovery, lifecycle cost, and end-to-end export, with held-out audit cases and no single headline price determining the result."},{"archetype_element":"Fair process and due process layer","domain_realization":"Requirements and weights are frozen before bids, clarification answers are shared, conflicts are disclosed, evaluators document decisions, and factual or procedural errors can be appealed to an independent reviewer."},{"archetype_element":"Anti-sabotage and anti-collusion guardrail","domain_realization":"The rules prohibit interference, deceptive demonstrations, cover bids, category partitioning, and bid rotation; uniform cross-cycle screens only refer anomalies for independent investigation."},{"archetype_element":"Externality and spillover boundary","domain_realization":"Lifecycle pricing, protocol tests, a transition reserve, and required recovery export place migration, remediation, and continuity obligations on the repository whose design creates them."},{"archetype_element":"Escalation and arms-race damper","domain_realization":"Equal test environments, page limits, demonstration time, clarification access, and a ban on donor inducements constrain competition through institutional wealth, lobbying, and presentation expenditure."},{"archetype_element":"Winner power and lock-in review","domain_realization":"Custody is time-limited, access authority remains with its legitimate holders, common export documentation is mandatory, a recovery copy is independently held, and concentration or foreclosure can trigger access or transfer remedies."},{"archetype_element":"Learning and recalibration loop","domain_realization":"Annual and end-of-term reviews compare actual preservation, access, incidents, costs, complaints, and transfer readiness with the contest’s purpose before another mandate is issued."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"tender_or_rfp_process","role":"Prequalifies repositories, discloses requirements before bidding, separates evaluators from collection requesters, documents selection, and supplies a usable protest route.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the structured solicitation, the mandate could revert to reputation, personal relationships, or a specification fitted retrospectively to a preferred repository."},{"mechanism_slug":"contest_rulebook","role":"Freezes legal moves, evaluation weights, protocol scenarios, conflicts, disqualification grounds, tie-breaks, and appeal procedures for repositories and judges alike.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a binding rulebook, lobbying, exclusive commitments, or post-bid changes could become effective winning strategies despite a formally open tender."},{"mechanism_slug":"ranked_leaderboard_with_audit","role":"Makes component performance comparable across the controlled custody trial while requiring independent reproduction and held-out validation before selection.","counterfactual_removal":"Without audited comparative performance, persuasive demonstrations or self-reported compliance could outrank actual protocol execution, recovery, and export capability."},{"mechanism_slug":"multiple_award_or_portfolio_selection","role":"Selects a primary custodian and an organizationally independent recovery custodian for complementary continuity, jurisdictional, and technical properties.","counterfactual_removal":"Without portfolio selection, one winner could hold every usable copy, metadata pathway, and recovery dependency, turning an operational failure or governance dispute into collection-wide failure."},{"mechanism_slug":"externality_bond_or_liability_rule","role":"Withholds a transition reserve until export, documentation, remediation, and verified deletion or retention duties are complete.","counterfactual_removal":"Without secured transition resources, a departing or insolvent custodian could leave communities and the next repository to finance recovery from the incumbent’s design choices."},{"mechanism_slug":"anti_collusion_monitoring","role":"Pools fixed bid and award indicators across custody contests to identify possible cover bids, rotation, or collection-category partitioning and refer them for inquiry.","counterfactual_removal":"Without cross-round observation, repositories could maintain the appearance of competition while informally protecting one another’s established collection territories."},{"mechanism_slug":"challenger_access_window","role":"Allows a qualified recovery custodian or outsider to contest continued primary custody when published portability, continuity, or protocol conditions fail, with mandatory recompetition at term end.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a real reopening path, accumulated data, integrations, and relationships could make the nominal five-year mandate practically permanent."},{"mechanism_slug":"antitrust_or_competition_review","role":"Examines whether the winner has foreclosed export, captured an indispensable identifier or access channel, or conditioned users on proprietary infrastructure unrelated to preservation merit.","counterfactual_removal":"Without winner-power review, successful custody could confer control over the infrastructure needed by every future challenger, making later tenders symbolic."},{"mechanism_slug":"post_contest_impact_review","role":"Compares realized preservation, access fidelity, incidents, user experience, lifecycle cost, concentration, and transfer readiness with the contest’s stated purpose.","counterfactual_removal":"Without retrospective review, a proxy that performed well in the trial but failed in long-term stewardship could remain embedded in subsequent contests."}],"causal_chain":["A finite endowment and custody mandate give qualified repositories reason to compete, while the records and their subjects remain outside the prize.","Prequalification removes repositories unable or unwilling to meet the noncontestable legal, consent, security, and cultural-governance floor.","A frozen rulebook and equal test environment constrain lobbying, inducements, concealed lock-in, and resource escalation as routes to winning.","Controlled ingestion, access-rule, interruption, recovery, and export tasks convert stewardship promises into comparable observable performances.","Held-out audits make successful protocol execution and portability more reliable winning routes than presentation quality or a temporarily low acquisition price.","Complementary primary and recovery awards prevent the first-place institution from controlling every operational copy and migration pathway.","Transition security, monitoring, inquiry, and disqualification rules keep lifecycle spillovers and coordinated pseudo-competition inside the arena’s consequences.","Expiring custody, challenger access, winner-power review, and mandatory export preserve the possibility of future rivalry after records and relationships accumulate.","Post-contest evidence revises the next trial, metric, eligibility rule, or custody model when observed outcomes diverge from the preservation purpose."],"baseline":"The consortium appoints one repository through professional reputation, prior relationships, minimum technical certification, and negotiation of a bespoke deposit agreement. Price and stated capabilities are reviewed, but repositories do not perform the same custody tasks, exit is tested only when needed, cumulative market concentration is not examined, and the appointed custodian commonly participates in defining later migration requirements.","nearest_rivals":["Direct appointment of a trusted public or university archive: continuity and fiduciary duty may outperform rivalry when institutional trust is the decisive stewardship requirement, but capability and exit performance are not comparatively tested.","A source-community-owned cooperative archive: it can align custody authority with the people represented in the records and may be preferable if sufficient governance and operational capacity exist, making inter-repository rivalry unnecessary.","Standards certification followed by a lottery among qualified repositories: it limits favoritism and proposal gaming but does not select among differences in recovery, cultural-protocol execution, lifecycle cost, or portability above the qualification floor.","Permanent redundant deposit across every qualified repository: it can improve availability without ranking custodians, but multiplies security surfaces, protocol administration, synchronization duties, and unclear responsibility.","A single long-term service contract with detailed interoperability clauses: it may control lock-in through contract enforcement alone, but does not independently test rival performance, collusion, winner concentration, or the credibility of future challenge."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The proposal’s contrast is conditional: when several repositories strategically pursue a scarce custody mandate, a governed performance contest may couple winning to demonstrated preservation, cultural-protocol fidelity, recovery, and exit while preventing the winner from owning the next arena. If legitimate authority requires direct community custody, repositories are operationally indistinguishable above a certification floor, or enforceable interoperability terms alone preserve transferability, the rivalry design is not warranted.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The consortium may allocate endowment funds and choose custodians for materials it lawfully controls. Depositors, record subjects, and source-community governance bodies retain whatever access, withdrawal, embargo, attribution, cultural, and intellectual-property authority their agreements and applicable rules recognize. A repository receives operational custody only, not authority to redefine those rights.","authorized_first_step":"Run the complete custody and export trial on a synthetic corpus containing invented interviews, multilingual metadata, simulated embargoes, withdrawal requests, provenance conflicts, and service failures. No restricted ethnographic record or real subject identifier may enter the test.","excluded_actions":["Treating records, record subjects, communities, cultural authority, consent, or withdrawal rights as prizes","Transferring restricted material before authority and consent conditions are verified","Contacting record subjects or source communities as a bidding tactic","Changing cultural access rules through repository scoring","Granting the winner intellectual-property ownership or permanent exclusivity","Publishing sensitive content, security details, or applicant allegations on the leaderboard","Treating an anti-collusion anomaly as proof or punishment","Using a successful synthetic trial as a substitute for ethics, legal, security, or community authorization","Requiring individuals or communities to waive withdrawal, return, or governance rights to improve a repository’s score"],"halt_rollback":"Stop before live transfer if the synthetic corpus cannot represent the operative access rules, evaluators cannot reproduce scores, export cannot be independently restored, community authorities reject the custody structure, or the primary and recovery roles remain legally ambiguous. Preserve the collection in its current authorized custody, release no restricted test derivatives, and use direct appointment or standards-based temporary storage while the contest is redesigned or retired."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"The strongest counterevidence would show that long-term stewardship outcomes depend mainly on durable trust, public-law obligations, and stable funding that a staged contest cannot observe; that qualified repositories do not strategically influence one another’s prospects; or that portability and cultural authority are already fully enforceable under a direct custody agreement.","problem_falsifier":"The problem pattern is falsified if there is no scarce custody mandate or endowment, unrestricted replication makes repositories nonrivalrous, the prospective custodian cannot influence future contestability, or authorized depositors and source communities have already selected a custodian through a process the consortium lacks authority to reopen.","intervention_falsifier":"Do not proceed if synthetic-trial rankings are unstable under identity permutation, known protocol violations pass the held-out audit, lifecycle scoring remains dominated by unverifiable assumptions, the recovery copy cannot be restored independently, smaller qualified repositories are excluded by contest overhead rather than capability, or portfolio selection leaves both copies under common operational control. Suspend live custody if access-rule errors, unresolved incidents, exit costs, community complaints, or concentration move adversely while formal scores remain high.","risks":["A synthetic corpus may reward test performance that does not predict decades-long preservation.","Published tasks may induce repositories to optimize demonstrations while neglecting unscored stewardship work.","The source-community council may not represent all record subjects or internal disagreements.","Two custodians may create inconsistent metadata, access decisions, deletion states, or incident responsibility.","Lifecycle-cost estimates may conceal future fees or depend on uncertain technical assumptions.","A transition reserve may be undersized or treated as permission to create remediable harm.","Standardized export requirements may discard culturally specific context that does not fit the chosen schema.","Resource caps may still favor incumbents that already own preservation infrastructure.","Collusion screens may mistake specialization, common costs, or legitimate collaboration for coordination.","Recompetition may disrupt trusted relationships and discourage long-horizon preservation investments.","Competition framing may obscure that some custody and cultural decisions should be cooperative or noncontestable."]},"next_evidence_step":"Create 8–10 synthetic repository submissions and three executable prototype environments, including a polished low-price lock-in bid, a small portable custodian, a cover bid, an innocent specialist, and a complementary recovery provider. Have separate preservation, community-protocol, security, cost, and appeal roles apply the frozen rules to staged embargo, withdrawal, corruption, outage, and export cases. Repeat with repository identities permuted and record score stability, held-out failure detection, false collusion referrals, successful neutral restoration, portfolio independence, appeal reversals, evaluator hours, and unresolved authority questions. Use the exercise only to decide whether an authorized pilot with nonrestricted institutional records is justified.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Proposal 1 governed competition among research teams for prospective field-site access, liaison hours, and participant recruitment opportunities; its causal concern was gatekeeper capture, cumulative contact burden, sampling distortion, and temporary placement lock-in. This proposal instead governs competition among repositories for custody of an already assembled ethnographic collection and preservation endowment. Its intervention is a staged custody, recovery, and export trial with dual organizational custody, transition security, portability testing, and winner-power review. Its causal path runs from verifiable lifecycle performance and independent recoverability to reduced archival lock-in, rather than from bounded researcher conduct and complementary study selection to reduced participant burden. It can be adopted without changing how fieldwork placements or recruitment are allocated.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":[],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}