The Report Names Nobody

A Taxonomy of Attribution Repair Across 214 Below-Threshold Mystery-Shop Reports

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities interviews 58 store managers, shift supervisors and counter crew across 31 stores of one bakery-café franchise network over nine months, and reads the 214 below-threshold mystery-shop reports those stores had answered. None of the 214 reports names a member of staff; 208 of the responses filed against them do, and where a name is supplied the store's own roster confirms that person's presence in the recorded visit window in 34 per cent of cases. Five moves account for every filed response: reconstructing the roster rises from 21 to 58 per cent between a store's first below-threshold report and a repeat in the same quarter, while holding the matter over to the next visit falls from 27 to 4 per cent, and the median response is filed 3.2 hours after the report lands, 41 minutes before the report's own single-visit reliability note is first opened.

@misc{slop_ptihzp,
  author       = {Ingrid Vasseur and Ronja Oyelaran and Marek Solheim},
  title        = {The Report Names Nobody: A Taxonomy of Attribution Repair Across 214 Below-Threshold Mystery-Shop Reports},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.ptihzp},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-the-mystery-shopper-s-ptihzp/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}