---
conjecture: r3-b1-06
family: grok
model: "Grok 4.5 expert (chat paste-back via orchestrator window)"
received: 2026-08-06
template: PROMPT_TEMPLATE_v1.md sha256 4344aabfacfe88362c56d89b6c89d594a7bf3a221e18a16b0e351482447e512f
rivals_parsed: 2
---

{
  "rivals": [
    {
      "mechanism": "The lower institutional-attribution rate is produced by systematically incomplete metadata supplied by the contributing Iranian institutions themselves, not by any special incompleteness in the union catalogue's own aggregation or harvest process.",
      "why_it_explains_the_same_evidence": "If a large fraction of the source records arriving from member institutions simply lack a holding-institution field, the aggregated catalogue will show ~70% completeness regardless of how carefully the union harvest is performed; continued growth from the same contributor pool will keep the rate stable and far below the near-100% comparators.",
      "named_confounds": ["source-institution cataloguing practice", "data-entry completeness in contributor feeds"],
      "discriminating_test": {
        "description": "Obtain or sample the original contributor-level metadata feeds (or any institution-specific export) before union aggregation and compute the institutional-attribution rate inside those raw feeds; compare it with the rate in the final union catalogue.",
        "computable_on_held_data": false,
        "what_result_favors_rival": "If the pre-aggregation contributor feeds already show approximately 70% completeness, this favors the rival (contributor incompleteness); if the feeds are near-complete and the drop occurs only after union processing, this favors the proposed catalogue-construction mechanism."
      }
    },
    {
      "mechanism": "A large share of records in this Iranian catalogue are intentionally left without a resolved institution because they represent privately held, unlocated, or historically dispersed items that the union project includes precisely to document them, whereas the comparator catalogues exclude such incompletely attributed material by policy.",
      "why_it_explains_the_same_evidence": "Inclusion of a persistent ~30% of records that lack institution fields by design would produce the observed 69.86% rate and keep it stable as the catalogue grows, while comparators that filter out such records remain near 100%; the training numbers match exactly.",
      "named_confounds": ["selection effects in what got catalogued", "catalogue scope policy regarding unlocated or private holdings"],
      "discriminating_test": {
        "description": "Identify the subset of records lacking institution attribution and examine any free-text notes, provenance fields, or status flags that indicate private ownership, loss, or dispersal; compute the share of such flagged records among the unattributed and among the attributed. Measure whether the unattributed set is dominated by these categories.",
        "computable_on_held_data": true,
        "what_result_favors_rival": "If the great majority of institution-less records carry explicit private/unlocated/dispersed flags while attributed records do not, this favors the rival (scope-policy inclusion); if unattributed records lack such flags and appear otherwise similar to attributed ones, this favors the proposed harvest-completeness mechanism."
      }
    }
  ],
  "no_viable_rival": false,
  "notes": ""
}
