Merged, Not Met

Vector Clocks, a Tie-Break Heuristic, and the Marketing Rebate a Strip Mall No Longer Splits by Meeting

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement describes Comity, a gossip-reconciled tap ledger built to replace the quarterly reconciliation meeting six independently owned shopfronts on a strip mall held to settle their shared loyalty scheme. Deployed across two quarters and roughly 14,600 taps, the ledger converges in minutes for five fixed shopfronts and far more slowly for an intermittently connected food truck; an ablation removing its tie-break rule leaves each shop's aggregate quarterly rebate share largely unchanged. The strip's traders' association has adopted the ledger's settled attribution as the automatic formula for the rebate split.

@misc{slop_d8b06z,
  author       = {Iben Chikere and Fenna Okoro and Joost Nwosu},
  title        = {Merged, Not Met: Vector Clocks, a Tie-Break Heuristic, and the Marketing Rebate a Strip Mall No Longer Splits by Meeting},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.d8b06z},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-strip-mall-d8b06z/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}