{"actors":["Court rulemaking committee or judicial council","Clerk's-office fee-relief staff","Judges or officers authorized to decide fee-relief applications","Court finance and administration staff","Applicants and their authorized representatives","Legal-aid and access-to-justice advisors","Court data-governance and audit staff"],"affected_objective":"Reviewable and proportionate filing-fee relief within the court's existing legal authority, while preserving access rights, mandatory exemptions, fiscal accountability, and consistent treatment of applicants with similar payment capacity.","arm":"ORDINARY_DIVERSE_P2","authority_safety":{"authorized_first_step":"The court's rulemaking, finance, and data-governance authorities may approve a retrospective shadow calculation on closed fee-relief applications using only fields already lawfully collected; calculated obligations remain analytical and cannot affect applicants or accounts.","decision_authority":"Only the judicial council, court rulemaking body, legislature, or other official holding the relevant legal authority may revise fee schedules, waiver criteria, payment obligations, or review procedures. Analysts and model maintainers may evaluate representations but may not decide applications or change rules.","excluded_actions":["No change to any open or closed applicant's fee, waiver, debt, payment plan, filing status, or case access","No use of the model to deny, delay, or condition access to a legally protected filing","No smoothing or displacement of mandatory waivers, statutory exemptions, fee maxima, appeal rights, or judicial discretion","No collection of new financial or household data during the retrospective review","No use of variables outside the factors legally authorized for fee-relief decisions","No automated final determination or collection action","No disclosure of applicant financial information beyond existing access permissions"],"halt_rollback":"Halt if mandatory legal categories cannot be separated from the discretionary range, recorded inputs do not support the proposed precision, calculations exceed authorized fee bounds, small unsupported input changes produce unstable obligations, or protected information cannot be contained. Roll back by deleting the derived shadow calculations and retaining the existing rule, records, and determinations as the sole operative system."},"baseline":"Within a legally discretionary partial-relief range, the court's administrative schedule assigns applicants to a small number of income or resource bands, each carrying a fixed fee fraction. Clerks apply the bands from periodic financial evidence and may record exceptional hardship separately, but the schedule does not expose how payment obligation changes across the interior of a band or immediately across its boundary.","candidate_id":"discrete_continuous_model_selection__law_governance__ORDINARY_DIVERSE_P2","causal_chain":["The baseline converts a varying capacity-to-pay measure into a few discrete bands for an allocation decision that can itself vary by small monetary increments.","Applicants with nearly equal authorized financial inputs can fall on opposite sides of a band boundary and receive discontinuously different fee obligations.","Applicants far apart within one band can receive the same obligation even when the rulemaking body would consider their payment capacity materially different.","Adding more bands would move and multiply the boundaries without determining whether stepwise treatment matches the decision need.","A continuous model over the legally discretionary range instead maps the authorized capacity measure to a bounded fee fraction through a published monotone curve.","Mandatory waivers, statutory exemptions, fee maxima, and matters outside the discretionary range remain outside the curve rather than being smoothed into it.","Evidence periods, input precision, caps, and final currency rounding are made explicit so the curve does not imply information finer than the record supports.","Retrospective boundary and perturbation tests determine whether the continuous representation produces more stable and explainable shadow obligations without overriding legal rules or individualized authority."],"cell_id":"discrete_continuous_model_selection__law_governance","consequence":"The categorical representation can create payment cliffs at administrative band boundaries and conceal meaningful variation within a band. If those artifacts influence fee relief, applicants with similar recorded capacity may face different burdens, while applicants with materially different capacity may appear equivalent; replacing the bands carelessly could instead smooth away mandatory legal protections or imply false financial precision.","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"This opportunity concerns quantization of filing-fee relief and tests a bounded continuous allocation curve. Its affected problem is applicant payment cliffs, its intervention is a continuous fee-obligation representation, and its causal path runs from band boundaries to discontinuous burdens—materially separate from enforcement-case prioritization, hybrid procedural timelines, and authority-state transitions.","experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp13_second_slot_policy60_20260806","intervention":"In retrospective shadow analysis, replace the discretionary schedule's internal fee bands with a published continuous sliding-obligation curve. The curve uses only legally authorized, record-supported inputs; is monotone over a defined capacity-to-pay measure; remains bounded by zero and the authorized fee; and excludes mandatory waivers, statutory exemptions, and other legally discrete conditions before calculation. Specify the financial-evidence period, treatment of missing or volatile inputs, numerical precision, caps, and a single final currency-rounding rule. Test existing and candidate representations on closed applications, especially near former band boundaries, before any rulemaking body considers prospective use.","mechanism_mapping":[{"counterfactual_removal":"Without the continuous process model, the candidate would retain internal eligibility steps and could not test whether gradual variation in authorized payment capacity should produce gradual variation in the obligation.","mechanism_slug":"continuous_process_model","role":"Represents the fee fraction as a bounded, monotone function across the legally discretionary capacity-to-pay range."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Without an explicit sampling interval, annual, monthly, and point-in-time financial records could be mixed silently, making apparent continuity an artifact of incompatible evidence periods.","mechanism_slug":"sampling_interval_choice","role":"Defines the authorized financial-evidence window and the conditions under which stale or volatile observations must be flagged rather than interpolated."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Without a documented quantization rule, clerks or software could reintroduce inconsistent hidden steps when translating a continuous result into payable currency.","mechanism_slug":"quantization_rule","role":"Limits unavoidable discretization to a transparent final currency increment after the continuous calculation, with caps applied consistently."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Without the resolution audit, the court could not distinguish genuine boundary instability from rounding, sparse records, mandatory legal discontinuities, or unsupported numerical precision.","mechanism_slug":"transition_resolution_audit","role":"Tests former band boundaries, legal scope edges, rounding points, missing-data cases, and small authorized input perturbations."}],"nearest_rivals":["Adding more income bands while retaining stepwise fee changes","Giving clerks broader case-by-case hardship discretion without a common continuous representation","Keeping categorical waivers but offering payment plans after the fee is assessed","Using one universal waiver cutoff with full payment above it","Changing documentary requirements without changing how recorded capacity is represented"],"negative_tests":{"intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is undermined if the shadow curve cannot be specified from legally authorized and sufficiently resolved inputs, if nearby supported inputs still yield unstable or inexplicable obligations, if reviewers cannot reproduce its outputs, or if preserving mandatory rules leaves no meaningful discretionary interval for continuous modeling.","problem_falsifier":"The problem is undermined if retrospective records show that every current band boundary corresponds to a legally required or operationally indivisible change, within-band capacity differences cannot lawfully affect obligations, and small movements across administrative boundaries do not alter any fee-relief determination.","risks":["The curve may give an appearance of precision unsupported by financial records.","A selected capacity measure may encode contestable assumptions about household needs or available resources.","Volatile income or emergency expenses may make a smooth calculation misleading.","Applicants may adjust the timing or presentation of reported inputs strategically.","Mandatory legal protections could be misclassified as discretionary and improperly smoothed.","A monotone curve may still impose unaffordable obligations in individual cases.","Implementation could increase explanation or verification burden.","Historical application records may contain missingness or measurement patterns that affect groups differently.","Staff may treat a shadow calculation as presumptively correct despite retained individualized authority.","Currency rounding and caps may create smaller residual discontinuities if not disclosed."],"strongest_counterevidence":"The strongest counterevidence would be a closed-application review showing that the existing bands track genuinely indivisible legal or administrative decisions, that cases near boundaries receive consistent individualized adjustments under current procedures, and that a continuous shadow schedule adds unsupported precision without changing any lawful explanation of payment capacity."},"next_evidence_step":"With rulemaking, finance, and data-governance approval, select 60 consecutively closed fee-relief applications from one court and a fixed filing quarter. Exclude applications governed entirely by mandatory waiver or exemption rules. Using only recorded authorized inputs, calculate the existing band result and a pre-specified shadow curve result. For each representation, record data sufficiency, reproducibility, obligation changes under small input perturbations supported by the record's precision, discontinuities at former boundaries and legal scope edges, currency-rounding effects, reviewer explanation quality, and processing time. Do not contact applicants, alter accounts, or use results operationally; require a documented halt, revise, or proceed decision after the 60-case review.","observable_state":"For each reviewed application, the shadow record displays the legally authorized input values and source dates; the financial-evidence window; missing, stale, or volatile inputs; whether a mandatory rule excludes the application from the curve; the continuous capacity measure; the published curve segment and unrounded fee fraction; applicable caps; the final rounding operation; the shadow obligation; the existing band result; nearby precision-bounded counterfactual calculations; the authorized human determination; and a complete calculation and access log.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","problem":"A court's discretionary filing-fee relief schedule represents payment capacity through a few categorical bands even though the authorized financial measure and the allocable fee fraction can vary gradually. The bands can introduce abrupt obligation changes for applicants near a boundary and erase differences within a band, while an undisciplined continuous replacement could obscure mandatory legal exemptions or overstate the precision of financial evidence.","proposal_index":2,"remaining_contrastive_claim":"Unlike additional bands, broader exceptions, payment plans, or a single waiver threshold, this candidate makes the step-versus-flow choice itself testable: it preserves legally mandatory discontinuities outside the model while representing only the discretionary fee allocation as a bounded continuous function with explicit evidence resolution and rounding.","revision_record":{"claim_changes":["Initial version makes no claim of novelty, prevalence, demand, or effect size.","Claims are limited to conditional representation errors and a falsifiable shadow-analysis rationale."],"conceptual_changes":["Initial candidate instantiates the archetype as a continuous allocation model replacing internal fee bands within a legally discretionary range.","Mandatory legal categories are treated as model-scope boundaries rather than variables to be smoothed."],"evidence_changes":["No prior-art or external evidence was consulted.","A bounded retrospective comparison on closed applications is specified as the first evidence step."],"operational_changes":["Initial version prohibits operational use and changes to applicant obligations.","Authority, input scope, evidence cadence, rounding, exclusions, audit fields, and halt conditions are explicit."],"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Independent domain problem","Materially distinct continuous intervention","Explicit false-discreteness and false-smoothness costs","Observable calculation state","Authority and rollback safeguards","Problem and intervention falsifiers","Bounded retrospective evidence step"]},"schema_version":1,"structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Decision Need","domain_realization":"The authorized body must determine a reviewable filing-fee contribution within a discretionary range while protecting court access and mandatory waiver rights."},{"archetype_element":"Process Change Signature","domain_realization":"Authorized measures of payment capacity and fee burden vary by degree, whereas mandatory exemptions and model-scope limits change applicability categorically."},{"archetype_element":"Cost of False Smoothness","domain_realization":"Smoothing a statutory exemption, mandatory waiver, fee maximum, or jurisdictional limit into the curve could dilute a protection or imply authority the court does not possess."},{"archetype_element":"Cost of False Discreteness","domain_realization":"Income or resource bands can impose abrupt fee changes on nearby applicants and treat materially different applicants inside one band as equivalent."},{"archetype_element":"Granularity Choice","domain_realization":"Use a continuous fee fraction within the discretionary range, preserve mandatory conditions as external scope rules, and quantize only the final amount to the stated currency increment."},{"archetype_element":"Step Boundary","domain_realization":"Each curve-scope edge, mandatory exclusion, cap, and rounding point has a published legal condition and deterministic treatment."},{"archetype_element":"Continuity Assumption","domain_realization":"The curve assumes gradual fee allocation is permissible only between the defined scope edges and only where authorized inputs support ordered differences in payment capacity."},{"archetype_element":"Measurement Resolution","domain_realization":"The evidence period, recorded numerical precision, document date, missingness, volatility flag, and final currency increment limit the precision of the calculation."},{"archetype_element":"Transition Validation","domain_realization":"Reviewers compare existing and shadow results at former band boundaries, legal scope edges, caps, rounding points, and cases with changing or incomplete inputs."},{"archetype_element":"Approximation Error Check","domain_realization":"The review records whether bands create unexplained obligation jumps and whether the curve erases a legally required distinction or produces unsupported fine-grained differences."},{"archetype_element":"Boundary Case Review","domain_realization":"Applications immediately inside and outside mandatory exclusions, former band cutoffs, curve endpoints, and fee caps receive separate legal and numerical review."},{"archetype_element":"Reversibility Check","domain_realization":"All calculations are shadow annotations on closed records and can be discarded without changing the governing schedule, applicant account, filing, or adjudication."},{"archetype_element":"Scale Shift Review","domain_realization":"Any later consideration for a different court, fee type, evidence period, or monetary scale requires revalidation of the curve, inputs, caps, and rounding rules."}],"title":"Continuous Filing-Fee Relief Curve Within the Legally Discretionary Range","version":0}