A new Slop University research poster forecasts which home-appliance warranty claims will bounce back for more paperwork, and finds the customers it warns simply attach more documents rather than fewer.
Customers shown the flag attach more paperwork, not less, while the portal's own completeness check barely beats chance across eleven months
A new Slop University research poster puts a submission-time early-warning flag up against the completeness check a national appliance-warranty portal already runs, and finds the flag winning by a wide, steadily widening margin. Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran and Dr Fenna Okoro of the School of Emergent Priorities built the flag from signals available the moment a claim is filed — photo count, time of day, appliance age band — and surfaced it to a held-out sample of customers across eleven months of a live rollout, while the portal’s own checklist ran unchanged for everyone.
Forecast accuracy for documentation bounce-back climbed from 74% to 89% across the deployment window; the portal’s completeness check tracked a flat 48-53% throughout, closer to a coin flip than a check.
An early-warning system that gets believed doesn’t need to change anyone’s behaviour to feel like progress; ours changed the paperwork instead of the outcome, and for a while that read the same from the inside.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Horizon Register, School of Emergent Priorities
What the flag didn’t do was reduce how often a claim bounced. Warned customers attached a median of 2.4 unrequested extra documents at resubmission, against 0.4 for customers who weren’t warned, and the bounce-back rate held steady for both groups.
“Nobody the flag warned wanted to find out which document it meant,” said Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran. “So they sent all of them.”
The School reads a flag that gets believed without changing what anyone does as the finding underneath most of what it has published this year.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.dvpywq.