# Working (discarded before grading)

**Step 1 — Problem statement.** Decision: design earning/spending rules, tracking, limits, and visible information for an hour-based mutual-help exchange so that active give-and-take holds or grows over a year and no easy-to-offer service systematically drains value. Bounds: organizers control credit issuance/redemption, what is tracked, what limits exist, what members see; they do NOT control members' intrinsic motives or external labor markets. Failure: runaway hoarding or deficit drift kills participation, OR a few low-value services dominate. Success is a *dynamic equilibrium* (circulation sustained), not a static ledger balance.

**Step 2 — Operative primes (search_prime + search_by_facets, meta-model queries).** Ran corpus_stats (643 primes/625 archetypes; semantic+graph live). Facet decomposition surfaced: liquidity, reciprocity, cooperation, reputation, balance, social_dilemma, free_riding, moral_hazard, social_loafing, mechanism_design/incentive_compatibility, price_mechanism, signaling, self_control, information_cascade. Targeted meta-model queries added: tragedy_of_the_commons (top hit, 0.735, with free_riding + public_goods family), scarcity, speculative_bubble, time_value_of_money, arbitrage, network_effect. The "idle stored token stops circulating" facet pointed at liquidity/turnover; the "mispriced low-cost action floods the system" facet pointed at moral_hazard/opportunity_asymmetry and archetype-side at payoff_restructuring + arbitrage_capture.

**Step 3 — Salience rank.** (1) tragedy_of_the_commons / free_riding — the deficit-drifters and hoarders both defect on circulation, a distributed-benefit/distributed-cost structure. (2) reciprocity / balance — the system's core invariant is sustained two-way flow, and it is drifting to chronic imbalance. (3) price_mechanism / signaling mispricing — the over-rewarded easy service is a proxy-vs-target gap (one hour ≠ one unit of needed value). (4) liquidity / turnover — credits are a circulating medium; hoarding is stalled velocity. (5) incentive_compatibility / mechanism_design — every rule becomes a new gaming target. (6) reputation / contribution visibility — the feedback signal that lets members self-correct. (7) moral_hazard / opportunity_asymmetry — flooding the cheap service.

**Step 4 — Operative subset (7).** tragedy_of_the_commons (circulation as commons), reciprocity/balance, price/proxy mispricing, liquidity/velocity, incentive_compatibility, reputation/visibility, free_riding. Pruned: speculative_bubble (no asset-price spiral), time_value_of_money (kept only as the demurrage rationale), network_effect (relevant to growth but not the destabilizer).

**Step 5 — Context model (typed graph).**
Nodes: Members{Hoarder, Deficit-Drifter, Flooder, Ordinary}, Credit (medium), Ledger (tracker), Service-Types{needed, easy/over-rewarded}, Organizers (rule-setter), Visible-Info.
Edges: Member —earns→ Credit (by Service); Member —spends→ Credit (consumes Service); Hoarder —accumulates,stops-offering→ Credit (velocity↓ — *liquidity stall, free_riding on others' supply*); Deficit-Drifter —over-consumes,exits→ system (*reciprocity breach*); Flooder —floods→ easy Service (*price/proxy mispricing → arbitrage of the flat 1hr=1credit rule*); Organizers —set→ {issuance, redemption, limits, visibility}; Visible-Info —feeds-back→ Member self-correction (*reputation/signaling*). The commons being depleted is **circulation itself**, not a stock.

**Step 6 — Meta-model.** A bounded set of recurring agents exchanges a fungible internal token whose only value is its continued acceptance. The token must keep moving for the system to live, but each agent's locally rational move (bank the token, consume without returning, or pump the lowest-effort high-yield action) degrades a shared circulation commons whose cost is dispersed. A flat conversion rule creates an exploitable spread between nominal price and real contributed value. Stabilize by: bounding stocks, attaching consequences to persistent one-sidedness with a repair path, repricing the proxy toward real value, and making each agent's standing visible so they self-correct — all while staying gameable-resistant and legitimate.

**Step 7 — Candidate archetypes (find_archetypes_for_prime + get_archetype).** From tragedy_of_the_commons: **commons_governance** (source). From reciprocity: **reciprocity_protocol_design** (source), **iterative_reciprocity_and_repeated_interaction** (related), skin_in_the_game_alignment. From the mispricing facet (archetype fusion): **payoff_restructuring**, **arbitrage_capture**, incentive_compatible_rule_design. Pulled full records for commons_governance, reciprocity_protocol_design, iterative_reciprocity, payoff_restructuring, arbitrage_capture.

**Step 8 — Reason via both views.** Context view: hoarding = stalled liquidity → commons_governance's *use-limit/replenishment* + a velocity device (decay/demurrage) restores turnover; deficit drift = reciprocity breach → reciprocity_protocol_design's *balance criterion + imbalance signal + repair path* (soft credit bands, not hard ledgers); flooding = arbitrage of a mispriced proxy → payoff_restructuring's *tie payoff to verified value* and *anti-crowding limit* reprice the easy service. Meta-model view agrees: bound stocks, condition future standing on contribution (shadow of the future — iterative_reciprocity), reprice proxy, visibility-as-feedback (commons monitoring + reputation). The four reconcile cleanly into one layered design; reciprocity_protocol_design supplies the *fairness/repair* frame that pure payoff_restructuring omits.

**Step 9 — Anti-signature walk.** *arbitrage_capture* — TRIPS its own anti-signature ("the better response is to CLOSE a harmful gap, not capture it"): we want closure of the mispricing spread, so use it only diagnostically, not as the design — DROPPED as an action archetype. *commons_governance* anti-sig "underproduction of a non-rival benefit → public_goods_provision instead": partly true (we also have underproduction), so I borrow its bounding/monitoring but pair with reciprocity, not adopt wholesale. *payoff_restructuring* anti-sig "actors already want to do right but lack capability": some deficit-drifters lack offerable skills, so pair repricing with low-barrier contribution paths, and avoid punishing the constrained (use positive/burden-reducing levers + capacity-sensitive balance per reciprocity_protocol_design). *iterative_reciprocity* anti-sig "actors can't be identified / no future": fails here — members ARE persistent and identifiable, so the shadow-of-the-future lever is valid. Final design = commons_governance bounding + reciprocity_protocol_design balance/repair + payoff_restructuring repricing, with iterative_reciprocity standing memory.

COST: ~9 operations, ~26k tokens

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Treat the credit not as money to be saved but as a token that only has worth while it keeps moving; the thing you are protecting is circulation itself, and almost every rule should push idle value back into flow.

**Stop hoarding by making stockpiles cost something and capping them.** Set a soft credit ceiling (for example, roughly the value of twenty to forty hours of help). Balances above that ceiling slowly decay — a few percent a month — and the decayed amount funds a community pool rather than vanishing, so it feels like reinvestment, not punishment. This removes the incentive to sit on credits and gently obliges high earners to either spend or keep offering at a normal pace. Pair it with a generous starter grant of credits to every new member so people can receive help before they have given any.

**Stop deficit drift with a band, not a wall.** Let members run a bounded negative balance (say, down to minus ten or fifteen hours) so newcomers and people in a hard stretch can draw help first and repay later — temporary imbalance is normal and fine. Below that band, members keep their ability to *offer* help but lose priority when *requesting* scarce help until they contribute again, and they get a friendly nudge plus an easy on-ramp ("here are three things you could offer this week"). Distinguish someone temporarily unable to give from someone persistently taking: only persistent, one-sided taking changes standing, and there is always a path back. No one is expelled for a deficit; they simply re-earn priority.

**Fix the mispriced services by pricing toward real value, not raw hours.** The flat "one hour earns one credit" rule is the exploitable gap that lets easy, abundant services flood in. Keep the hour as the base unit for honesty and simplicity, but let the *price the requester pays* float with demand and supply: services almost nobody requests (or that many people are offering) earn a declining multiplier, while genuinely needed, scarce, or higher-effort help earns a premium. Cap how many credits any single member can earn per week from one service category — an anti-flooding limit — so no one can pump a single cheap offering to dominate the exchange. Adjust these multipliers from observed request-versus-offer data on a regular cadence (monthly), and announce changes openly so the system never feels arbitrary.

**Make standing visible so members self-correct.** Show each member their own give/take balance, their recent activity, and a simple reliability signal (offers fulfilled, requests honored). Show the community, in aggregate, which kinds of help are in short supply right now and which are oversupplied — this directly steers willing contributors toward where they are actually needed, replacing central rationing with informed choice. Keep this recognition-oriented, never shaming: surface contribution and unmet need, not rankings of who is "behind."

**Govern it as a living commons.** Publish the rules — ceilings, decay rate, deficit band, pricing multipliers, weekly caps — as a short, plain charter that members can see and that organizers revise on a fixed schedule using the exchange's own data. Provide a lightweight appeal path for edge cases (a long illness, a member whose only offerable skill is currently oversupplied) so fairness survives contact with real life. Watch for new gaming the moment any rule changes, because members respond to the rule as written, and treat each evasion as a signal to recalibrate rather than to crack down.

**Final operating rule:** keep credits flowing rather than accumulating, let balances swing both ways within fair bounds with an easy path back to good standing, price help by how much it is actually needed rather than how easy it is to give, and show everyone where contribution is wanted — then revise these dials openly whenever the flow stalls or skews.
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