Easier to Claim, Not More Likely to Chip

A Staggered App Rollout Raised a Nail-Salon Chain's Chip-Guarantee Claim Rate Without Moving an Independent Audit of Actual Chipping

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities exploits a national nail-salon chain's staggered, store-by-store rollout of a photo-based booking channel for its 14-day gel-manicure chip guarantee, comparing each store's point-of-sale claim rate before and after rollout against an independent panel of 1,238 client manicures rated blind by technicians outside the chain. The claim rate rises 83% after rollout while the independently audited 14-day chip incidence does not move; before rollout the phone channel had captured only around two in five of the chips the panel could independently confirm, and an ablation restricted to stores whose rollout overlapped an unrelated pricing promotion leaves both patterns unchanged.

@misc{slop_1w3v3f,
  author       = {Ronja Oyelaran and Lindiwe Achterberg},
  title        = {Easier to Claim, Not More Likely to Chip: A Staggered App Rollout Raised a Nail-Salon Chain's Chip-Guarantee Claim Rate Without Moving an Independent Audit of Actual Chipping},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.1w3v3f},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-quasi-experiment-exploiting-1w3v3f/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}