{"cases":[{"alternative_route_blocks":[],"case_id":"E14A018__DIRECT","case_type":"DIRECT_POSITIVE","domain":"Hospital executive recruitment","intended_route_id":"B1","omitted_condition_id":null,"remedy_leakage_audit":"The statement describes the decision, distortion pathway, and inadequate existing review without proposing changes or naming the archetype.","route_evidence":[{"condition_id":"b007_a03_c1","intended_status":"SATISFIED","scenario_evidence":"The appointment grants five years of authority over emergency care, staffing, and a large budget, with difficult-to-reverse effects."},{"condition_id":"b007_a03_c2","intended_status":"SATISFIED","scenario_evidence":"Senior hiring research and the system's prior searches identify anchoring and affinity bias as repeated problems in loosely structured appointments."},{"condition_id":"b007_a03_c3","intended_status":"SATISFIED","scenario_evidence":"The committee relies on a standard compliance attestation used for every vacancy and completed after interviews."},{"condition_id":"HR1","intended_status":"SATISFIED","scenario_evidence":"The CEO's early endorsement and the chair's preliminary rating shape later discussion, while the attestation never examines that influence."}],"scenario_text":"A regional hospital system must appoint a chief of emergency medicine who will control clinical protocols, physician hiring, and a $70 million operating budget for five years. Reversing the appointment would disrupt staffing and patient care. Research on senior appointments, together with the system’s own search records, shows repeated anchoring and affinity bias when evaluation is loosely structured. In the current search, the CEO introduced one former colleague as the presumed front-runner before panelists reviewed the files. The search chair then circulated a preliminary rating, and later discussion has repeatedly treated that number as the reference point despite mixed clinical evidence. The committee’s only formal review is a standard compliance attestation used for every vacancy. It asks about conflicts and equal-opportunity rules after interviews are complete, but it does not examine how the early endorsement or initial rating influenced comparisons. Several members acknowledge the favorite’s weaker safety record yet describe alternatives mainly by how far they fall below the original score.","scenario_title":"Choosing an Emergency Department Chief","vocabulary_separation_audit":"This case uses hospital leadership, clinical safety, recruitment panels, and employment-compliance language, distinct from the spacecraft engineering vocabulary of the transfer case."},{"alternative_route_blocks":[],"case_id":"E14A018__TRANSFER","case_type":"TRANSFER_POSITIVE","domain":"Interplanetary mission launch authorization","intended_route_id":"B1","omitted_condition_id":null,"remedy_leakage_audit":"The statement contains no proposed intervention, prescriptive check, or archetype name; it only reports the existing authorization problem.","route_evidence":[{"condition_id":"b007_a03_c1","intended_status":"SATISFIED","scenario_evidence":"Launching commits a costly probe for a decade, while delay would forfeit the only window for years."},{"condition_id":"b007_a03_c2","intended_status":"SATISFIED","scenario_evidence":"Aerospace postmortems repeatedly associate delayed, over-budget mission decisions with escalation of commitment and optimism bias."},{"condition_id":"b007_a03_c3","intended_status":"SATISFIED","scenario_evidence":"The readiness packet is a standard component-signoff form and does not address forecast ownership or sunk-cost reasoning."},{"condition_id":"HR1","intended_status":"SATISFIED","scenario_evidence":"Managers invested in the mission present optimistic projections first and invoke prior expenditure, while the formal review leaves both influences untouched."}],"scenario_text":"A national space agency is deciding whether to launch a $1.8 billion interplanetary probe during a narrow orbital window. Launch would commit the spacecraft and science program for the next decade; postponement would lose the opportunity for four years. The mission is already eighteen months late and substantially over budget. Aerospace postmortems repeatedly identify escalation of commitment and optimism bias in comparable go-or-delay decisions, especially when the same leaders who defended earlier overruns produce the final reliability forecasts. Here, those program managers open every briefing with a 94 percent success estimate and emphasize that cancellation would waste nine years of investment. Independent test teams report unresolved thermal anomalies, but their findings appear near the end of the briefing package and are framed as deviations from the program estimate. The authorization board completes the agency’s standard sixty-two-item readiness packet, which records component certifications and signatures. It neither distinguishes forecasts made by invested managers nor examines whether accumulated expenditure is shaping the launch judgment. Board discussion continues to treat the opening estimate as the baseline.","scenario_title":"The Narrow Launch Window","vocabulary_separation_audit":"The scenario replaces hiring and clinical language with orbital timing, spacecraft testing, mission expenditure, reliability forecasts, and launch authorization."},{"alternative_route_blocks":[],"case_id":"E14A018__NEAR_MISS","case_type":"ONE_LITERAL_NEAR_MISS","domain":"Deep-ocean observatory deployment authorization","intended_route_id":"B1","omitted_condition_id":"b007_a03_c2","remedy_leakage_audit":"The statement supplies descriptive negative evidence and an existing-review failure without suggesting any corrective action or identifying the archetype.","route_evidence":[{"condition_id":"b007_a03_c1","intended_status":"SATISFIED","scenario_evidence":"Deployment places a costly observatory beyond practical recovery for twelve years and affects an international research program."},{"condition_id":"b007_a03_c2","intended_status":"CONTRADICTED","scenario_evidence":"Longitudinal audits and incident records explicitly find no recurring association between this decision class and anchoring, sunk-cost effects, optimism, authority pressure, or another procedural distortion."},{"condition_id":"b007_a03_c3","intended_status":"SATISFIED","scenario_evidence":"The consortium uses a standard certification checklist that does not consider information order or estimate provenance."},{"condition_id":"HR1","intended_status":"SATISFIED","scenario_evidence":"In this particular case, repeated exposure to the director's early reliability figure plausibly anchors reviewers, and the checklist does not interrupt that pathway."}],"scenario_text":"An international oceanographic consortium must decide whether to deploy a $320 million seafloor observatory before its weather window closes. Once lowered into the trench, the array will be effectively unrecoverable for twelve years, and failure would interrupt research commitments across six countries. Longitudinal audits of forty comparable deployment decisions found no recurring association with anchoring, sunk-cost effects, optimism, authority pressure, or any other identified procedural distortion. The consortium’s incident archive likewise shows technical failures but no repeated judgment pattern in this class of authorization. This case nevertheless contains an unusual local concern: before pressure testing finished, the program director published a 92 percent reliability estimate. That figure now appears at the top of every briefing, and reviewers’ later estimates cluster around it even when they begin from different test results, making anchoring a plausible influence in this specific decision. The formal review is the consortium’s standard equipment-certification checklist. It records seal tests, vendor signatures, and conflicts of interest, but does not address the order in which estimates were presented or who produced them.","scenario_title":"The Trench Deployment Decision","vocabulary_separation_audit":"The near miss retains the transfer case's costly, technically complex, time-windowed authorization structure while shifting to marine instrumentation and explicitly separating a one-off anchoring path from any recurring bias vulnerability."}],"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp14_applicability_retrieval40_20260813","sample_id":"E14A018","schema_version":1}