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Applied and bridge studies study record
Decision Accounting & recordsWhy Nudges Fail in High-Stakes Governance: Decision Accounting as a Pre-Decisional Behavioral Guardrail
STATUS · Manuscript in progressSSRN · Not yet posted
MECHANISM
Identify the incentive structure and the condition that would falsify the claim.
RULE CHANGE
Read the intervention only after the paper shows how the current payoff space fails to support system welfare.
READER USE
Use the summary to see where private gain creates system exposure, then check the study record.
Contribution — what this adds to the conversation
Completes the nudge-to-guardrail spectrum; provides falsifiable study designs and formal boundary conditions; contributes to behavioral governance theory.
WHAT'S NEW · Proves a new theorem (Nudge-Guardrail Boundary) and identifies three failure modes of nudges in governance; integrates MST, DA, and behavioral economics into a unified guardrail framework.
The paper establishes the Nudge-Guardrail Boundary Theorem: for high-stakes governance decisions, nudges fail systematically due to insufficiency, decay, and normalization of deviance. A mandatory pre-decisional documentation guardrail with multi-audience architecture succeeds through cognitive forcing, commitment anchoring, and multi-audience activation. The welfare cost ratio across 61 institutional domains is 6.00. Four falsifiable study designs are specified.