## Working (verbs run, in order)

**lift / decompose** — Stripped the situation to its structural core: an uninformed decider faces a population of two *hidden* types (low- and high-risk) that cannot be directly observed; participation is endogenous to the terms offered, and the *worse* type is the most eager to come forward. Two candidate responses: (A) a self-sorting menu, (B) a single uniform tighter bar. Success requires BOTH that the accepted pool not be dominated by undisclosed high-risk AND that low-risk not be needlessly turned away. So this is a pre-commitment, hidden-characteristic selection problem, not a post-commitment behavior problem.

**match (semantic, meta-model query)** — Queried with the domain-stripped structure ("hidden types, the worse type is most eager, design options so each type self-selects and reveals itself"). Top hits: the hidden-characteristic-selection prime (score 0.68, the canonical diagnosis), its receiver-side menu-design response (distinctive, 0.83 percentile), and the sender-side costly-communication sibling.

**match (facets, oblique)** — Decomposed into five structural facets (hidden two-type mix; eager-worse-type so participation is a bad signal; uniform threshold rejects good and bad alike; menu that makes each type pick its own option; a costly requirement the bad type won't pay but the good one will). Fused ranking surfaced the same selection prime at the top of the prime list and the **hidden-type-screening** intervention archetype as the top archetype (RRF 0.059, well clear of the field), with the menu-design and "skin-in-the-game" patterns close behind.

**transport / get_prime + get_archetype** — Pulled the full selection prime, the menu-design prime, and the screening archetype to map roles and, critically, to read the *failure conditions* of each candidate.

**compose (typed relational model)** —
- Approach B (uniform stricter bar) = a *pooling* response. One threshold applied to all types. Because type is unobservable, the single bar cannot separate: it can only trade one failure for the other. Set it high enough to keep the eager high-risk out and it also excludes genuine low-risk applicants who fall on the wrong side of the same blunt line — the "needlessly turned away" failure. Set it low enough to admit the low-risk and the eager high-risk pour through — the "pool dominated by undisclosed high-risk" failure. A single instrument cannot satisfy two separation constraints at once.
- Approach A (self-sorting menu) = a *screening / separating* response. It offers terms whose cost structure differs by type — an option only worthwhile to low-risk, or a requirement cheap for low-risk and costly for high-risk — so each type's own self-interest leads it to the option meant for it, and the choice itself reveals the hidden characteristic. This is the mechanism designed precisely to hit both success criteria simultaneously: low-risk are admitted on their own favorable terms (not turned away), and high-risk are either priced/screened out or pay a cost that offsets their risk (pool not dominated).

**evaluate-fit (gate against known failure conditions)** — Checked A against the screening pattern's documented failure modes: (i) the menu must be *incentive-compatible* — each type must actually prefer its own option (the requirement must be genuinely costlier for high-risk, not just nominally so); (ii) the separating option is generically a *second-best* with some efficiency/information-rent cost and some downward distortion of the low-risk option; (iii) it reveals type only along the dimension the menu distinguishes. None of these are disqualifying here: they are design constraints, and the situation explicitly grants that such cost-asymmetric terms exist ("cheap for low-risk and costly for high-risk"). Checked B: its failure mode is exactly the success criterion's forbidden zone — a uniform bar cannot avoid either over-exclusion or pool degradation because it has one lever for a two-type separation problem.

**reconcile (the decoy)** — The committee's point that a uniform bar is "cleaner and easier to defend in a public report" is a presentation/legibility consideration, not a selection-quality consideration. It speaks to how the decision reads, not to whether the admitted pool meets the two required outcomes. Weighing it against the success criteria, the defensibility of the report cannot override the substantive requirement; a cleaner report that admits the wrong pool fails the stated goal. So this factor is set aside as non-decisive.

**salience-rank / prune** — The decisive structural fact is that the goal demands *separation of two unobservable types*, and only a self-sorting menu can separate while a single uniform bar can only trade one failure for the other. Everything else (report aesthetics, second-best distortion) is secondary. STOP.

===DECISION_BEGIN===
DECISIVE_FACTOR: Because the two groups can't be told apart on sight and the goal forbids both admitting hidden high-risk applicants and turning away genuine low-risk ones, only a set of options that makes each group sort itself can satisfy both at once — a single uniform cutoff can only trade one of those failures for the other.
CHOICE: A
JUSTIFICATION: Since you cannot directly see who is low- or high-risk, any single bar applied to everyone forces a bad tradeoff: pitch it high and you reject worthy low-risk applicants, pitch it low and the most eager high-risk applicants flood in. Offering a set of terms deliberately built so that the option (or requirement) is attractive/cheap for low-risk applicants but unattractive/costly for high-risk ones lets people sort themselves, so their own choice reveals which group they belong to. That simultaneously keeps the admitted pool from being overrun by hidden high-risk applicants and avoids needlessly excluding good ones. A cleaner-looking uniform rule may be easier to write up, but ease of public explanation does not change who actually ends up admitted.
===DECISION_END===
