Clearing Conditional Commitments

Working paper, draft v1 (June 2026).

Clearing Conditional Commitments: Privacy, Specification, and Custody in a Clearinghouse for Interdependent Action — Timothy J. Miano.

Abstract

Latent willingness of the form "I will, if enough of the right others will" has no standard clearing institution. We model a conditional-commitment clearinghouse: a platform that authenticates participants, verifies that their mutual conditions are jointly satisfiable, routes compatible counterparts to one another, and chooses three design dials — custody of principal, specification timing, and disclosure granularity — before activating the coalition at a fixed point. The central result is that the welfare-maximizing clearinghouse is minimal on all three dials at once: it holds no principal, fixes terms late, and discloses progress only through a k-anonymized aggregate. The result is stated with its boundary: it holds in a bounded high-authenticity, intermediate-integrity region, reverses on each axis outside it, and the three minimalisms are coupled in welfare magnitude rather than additively separable. Three further results discipline the disclosure claim: the privacy dial's screening cost is a genuine information-leakage object (Shannon mutual information between coalition type and the k-anonymized support count); the masking advantage survives a refinement-free selection under Carlsson–van Damme risk dominance; and partial masking is constrained-optimal because a single disclosure dial necessarily bundles "this coalition is real" with "you are not pivotal."

JEL: C72, D82, D47, H41. Keywords: conditional commitment, coordination, information design, k-anonymity, market design, assurance contracts.

Contents

• main.tex — paper body (canon for all prose, abstract, citations)
• appendix/ — Propositions 1–3, statements and proofs
• references.bib — bibliography (41 entries, citation-verified)
• figures/make_figs.py — figure generation
• numerics/ — the numerical companion: model, verification, and counterexample-search scripts behind the propositions and figures (see numerics/README.md)
• main.pdf, figures/*.pdf — build artifacts, committed for convenience
• SOURCES.md — canon/precedence map for the source tree

Build

tectonic main.tex

Figures regenerate from the repository root:

uv run --with numpy --with scipy --with matplotlib python figures/make_figs.py

The numerical scripts run the same way, for example uv run --with numpy --with scipy python numerics/check.py. numerics/README.md records what each script checks and its results of record. Some of its notes refer to working documents that are not part of this snapshot.

Read more

• Paper on SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6946318
• Plain-language introduction (Estate of Bits): https://estateofbits.substack.com/p/i-will-if-enough-of-the-right-others

Provenance

This is a decoupled snapshot of the canonical working tree (private). The plain-language companion introduction is published separately (linked above) and is not part of this repository. Paths in SOURCES.md referring to companion-intro.* or ~/om/docs/lit/... describe the canonical tree, not this snapshot.