Judgment Cost Theory, Study 2 — Replication and Audit Archive: When Automation Concentrates Judgment: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Residual Decision Difficulty and Oversight Burden Following AI Adoption

Abstract

Replication and audit archive for Judgment Cost Theory, Study 2: When Automation Concentrates Judgment: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Residual Decision Difficulty and Oversight Burden Following AI Adoption (Jason West, Liberty University). The review tests the theory's concentration and non-substitution propositions against 80 real-world deployments of learned decision-support systems, identified from 17,120 records across thirteen sources, with screening and extraction performed in duplicate by paired large-language-model reviewer-agents under frozen prompts and every disagreement adjudicated by the author. The archive is the complete and corrected record of the review: the registered protocol and dated amendment log, coding manual (v2.3) with superseded versions, search log and database strings, reliability ledger with blinded recall audits, frozen reviewer and coder instruments, per-record screening dispositions, corrected PRISMA 2020 flow, the 80-study analytic datasets with a replication codebook, all analysis scripts with a verification routine (run_all.py --verify) that reproduces every deposited result exactly, manuscript tables and figures, and a consolidated deviations-and-corrections list (X1–X12) that documents every departure from the registered plan and every correction of the record, including a post-deposit source re-verification of all computable effect sizes. A SHA-256 manifest covers every file. Requirements for reproduction: Python 3 with NumPy and SciPy. This archive accompanies the OSF registration at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/8YB9G (submitted 3 August 2026, issued 6 August 2026). The registration is frozen at submission and records the protocol and screening trail as they stood before extraction; where the two differ, this archive is authoritative for everything dated after 3 August 2026, and the deviations list explains every difference. This is v2 of the archive, superseding the 6 August v1 build; the README's opening section explains what changed and why.