Exit Mechanisms Under Specification: Cycling, Inert Deadlines, Resource Gates, and a Dependence Error

Abstract

Institutional design criteria can sound precise while leaving their operative failure path untouched. This paper converts four proposed conflict-intervention exit-mechanism criteria into executable rules and asks whether they behave coherently inside their own stipulated logic. The exercise is a falsification and specification test, not an empirical validation study. Execution exposed three design failures and one specification error: signal-conditioned sunset produced repeated exit and re-entry while the entanglement measure saturated; the duty-to-decide clock rarely fired; pre-resourcing behaved as a binary feasibility gate; and the original common-mode parameter combined contemporaneous cross-node dependence with temporal persistence. A targeted redesign found a localized contemporaneous interaction, left the persistence interaction unresolved, and supported a bounded same-period fast-path account while a frozen continuation-ratio extension was not supported. The deposit includes the paper PDF and a supplementary archive containing the Markdown manuscript, frozen analysis materials, source code and tests, cell-level summaries, compact execution receipts, and a numeric-source ledger. Every parameter is stipulated, escalation does not alter modeled hazard or harm, and the historical cases are structural motivations rather than calibration or validation targets.