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title: "Clearing Conditional Commitments: Privacy, Specification, and Custody in a Clearinghouse for Interdependent Action"
type: generic
authors:
  - family-names: Miano
    given-names: Timothy J.
    affiliation: "Affiliate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Founder & CEO, Proffer Futures, Inc."
    email: timmiano@mit.edu
date-released: 2026-06-11
version: "1.0 (working draft v1)"
url: "https://github.com/mini-mato/clearing-conditional-commitments"
keywords:
  - conditional commitment
  - coordination
  - information design
  - k-anonymity
  - market design
  - assurance contracts
  - mechanism design
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. Three further results discipline the disclosure
  claim, covering the information-leakage cost of screening, a
  refinement-free selection under risk dominance, and the structural reason
  partial masking is constrained-optimal. JEL: C72, D82, D47, H41.