A new Slop University paper interviews strip-mall traders about adapting to MERIT, a recommendation-inclusion floor that becomes a trader's permanent minimum the moment their visibility rate first clears it.
A School of Continuous Improvement study interviews traders on living inside MERIT, the recommendation-inclusion floor that only ever ratchets up
Dr Joost Nwosu’s research keeps returning to the same moment in an institution’s life: the day after a target is finally met. His latest paper, with Dr Fenna Okoro and Dr Petra Umbile, finds that moment recurring across a strip-mall trader co-op that ties continued advertising-fund membership to how often a member appears in a local AI recommendation assistant — the kind a shopper now asks “where can I get X near me.”
The co-op’s rule, formalised by the School of Continuous Improvement as MERIT, sets no target in advance. It waits for a trader’s own best quarter, then locks that rate in as the floor every quarter after must clear, with no seasonal adjustment and no appeal once granted. Open-coded interviews with strip-mall traders surface how unevenly the floor is lived with: some described treating a strong month as a risk rather than a win, and more than one admitted keeping a second, unlisted storefront in reserve against exactly this outcome.
“A number that only ever tightens has stopped measuring performance and started measuring how long a trader can keep performing it,” Dr Nwosu said. Dr Okoro placed the finding against the co-op’s own minutes, which record the floor being adopted “because it required no further decisions” — the same property the paper finds traders now arrange their year around.
The team paired the interviews with a co-op-wide comparison of floor levels by trading category, and a check of whether an alternative averaging rule would have set any floor lower. It would not have.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.rwtheg.