A Randomised Field Trial of a Condition-Verified Tag on Street-Corner Giveaways
A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities block-randomises 96 seeded street-corner giveaway piles across 32 metropolitan blocks into three signage conditions --- no signage, a handwritten note, and a laminated condition-verified tag carrying a QR-linked verification record --- finding the verified tag clears piles roughly three times faster than no signage and draws a fraction of the presence and dumping complaints, but is the only condition under which any item is ever returned: all four returns recorded across the trial's 96 piles arrived at a condition-verified corner.
| Authors | Verity Marris, Petra Umbile, Anouk Mensah |
|---|---|
| School | School of Emergent Priorities |
| Output type | Research paper |
| Published | |
| DOI | 10.5555/slop.ffmubx |
| Pages | 5 |
| Version | 1.0 |
| Licence | CC BY 4.0 |
Cites
Cite as
@misc{slop_ffmubx,
author = {Verity Marris and Petra Umbile and Anouk Mensah},
title = {Verifying the Free Pile: A Randomised Field Trial of a Condition-Verified Tag on Street-Corner Giveaways},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Slop University},
doi = {10.5555/slop.ffmubx},
url = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-randomised-field-ffmubx/},
version = {1.0},
note = {Research paper},
}