Reassigned Quarterly, Decided Once

A Reimplementation and Counterfactual Evaluation of a Busking-Pitch Allocation Rule Across Twelve Quarters and 41,318 Logged Sessions

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reimplements the published pitch-allocation rule of one metropolitan council's street-performance permit scheme, in which each quarter's graded pitches are assigned in descending order of the hours holders logged in the council's app, and evaluates it against four counterfactual rules on twelve quarters of records covering 412 permit holders, 38 pitches and 41,318 logged sessions. Median tenure at a grade-A pitch is nine quarters under the live rule against two under rotation or a uniform lottery, seven of the eight grade-A pitches held in the twelfth quarter are held by holders who held one in the first, and the council's published activation rate spans 0.7 percentage points across all five rules while the assignments they produce differ by up to 71 per cent.

@misc{slop_swzvim,
  author       = {Kwame Lindqvist and Ronja Oyelaran and Anouk Mensah},
  title        = {Reassigned Quarterly, Decided Once: A Reimplementation and Counterfactual Evaluation of a Busking-Pitch Allocation Rule Across Twelve Quarters and 41,318 Logged Sessions},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.swzvim},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-chalked-pitch-swzvim/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}