Research papers

Research papers published by Slop University.

All research outputs of the University are published open access under CC BY 4.0, with persistent identifiers minted by the Office of Research Outputs.

Published outputs

Paper

The Courier Absorbs the Estimate

Casimir Beng, Solveig Adeyemi, Mirela Hanke · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.2udumk

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement analyses 2,614 complaint tickets filed with a widely used food-delivery platform across a staged wording change to its late-order notification, from a generic acknowledgement to one naming the courier directly. Courier-directed blame more than doubles after the change while estimate-directed blame falls by a comparable margin, median lateness and support-agent escalation rates hold steady, and displaying the courier's own name adds no further shift.

Paper

Logged, Not Signed

Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Renke Sabel · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.a1hnm0

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement compares eleven public swimming pool centres that kept a paper sign-in ledger against thirteen that retired it once an electronic turnstile log made the ledger redundant, tracking incident-report completion and dispute-resolution time across a fourteen-month window. Neither operational measure moves, but staff confidence that an incident could be reconstructed from the centre's records falls sharply where the ledger is dropped and holds where it is kept, a gap a printed summary of the same electronic log does not close.

Paper

Spun Fair, Done Elsewhere

Runa Adegoke, Ronja Oyelaran, Kwame Lindqvist · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.d7bnmg

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities tracks 76 households' magnetic chore wheels across an 18-week deployment, matching the wheel's posted weekly assignment against an independently logged record of who actually completed each of four tracked chores, before and after the households adopt a formal appeals process for disputed turns. Assignment concordance rises from a 61.2% baseline average to 87.5% once the appeals process begins, while the household's underlying task-completion rate holds flat, and appeals filed under the new process concentrate heavily on a single chore.

Paper

The Bucket Didn't Move the Score

Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Dagny Okafor, Renke Sabel · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.q97hce

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement pairs 704 pub-trivia teams' self-reported scores against an independent, unannounced spot-check tally across a sixteen-week season at 22 venues, testing what changes once half the venues post an honesty placard above the existing phone bucket. Self-report accuracy holds flat before and after the placard (89.6% vs 90.9% concordance, not significant), while voluntary self-correction of a team's own submitted score rises from 3.4% to 14.2% at placard venues and stays flat at a decorative-bucket control arm.

Paper

Slower to the Same Window

Ronja Oyelaran, Runa Adegoke, Anouk Mensah · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.vi3n0q

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities tracks nineteen charity op shops across a twenty-four-week deployment, comparing the category of item that wins the network's weekly "Find of the Week" window display, the volume of volunteer input the choice draws on, and the time it takes to reach the glass, before and after a rostered volunteer's informal pick is replaced by a nomination form and a rotating three-volunteer panel. Winning-item category holds flat (57.1% practical/wearable before, 54.5% after; not significant), as does weekly input volume, while median decision-to-publish latency rises from same-day to four days and a parallel ablation withholding the panel's published rationale leaves that latency unchanged.

Paper

Folded Twice, Told Anyway

Renke Sabel, Bram Ntuli, Joost Nwosu · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.6c4dv1

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement audits twenty workplace Secret Santa exchanges, finding that an anonymous app-matched draw leaks a recipient's identity to about as many participants as a paper-slip hat draw does, but through a different channel --- and that app-matched teams are far quicker to issue a corrective re-draw once a leak surfaces.

Paper

Whoever Was Mid-Load

Marit Osayande, Ronja Oyelaran · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.ws53l7

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement instruments 31 share houses running an energy-budget power-board over sixteen weeks, logging 2,314 cutoff events against each house's published fairness rotation and each appliance's live draw. A classifier predicting which resident's appliance is cut from live load rank alone reaches 89.7% accuracy, against 24.1% for the rotation's own protected-day status, because the rotation can shield only one resident per day regardless of household size. Cutoffs concentrate on short, high-draw appliances that account for 75% of events against 18% of connected time.

Paper

Agreed Until It Mattered

Casimir Beng, Osei Vandermeer, Renke Sabel · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.m0pulh

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement builds a cheap sensor comparator rig and runs it alongside a ten-pin bowling alley's proprietary lane-scoring and foul-detection system for a full league season, finding near-perfect agreement on routine frames but only fair agreement on disputed ones. An independent video review finds the comparator's and the incumbent's disputed-frame calls about equally accurate, yet the league's rules committee upholds the incumbent's original call in 91% of formal disputes.

Paper

The Slip Outlasted the App

Runa Adegoke, Mirela Hanke · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.8qqhhm

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement reports the design, staggered rollout, and eight-week pilot of a paper-till, sticker-tag pre-order system built to replace a primary school canteen's commercial ordering app, tracking uptake, mismatch, and processing-time across 6,140 orders. A parallel document-analysis pass finds the system's order-timestamp log acquired an unplanned second use as an informal lateness flag for the front office.

Paper

Scanned Rarely, Compared Almost Never

Runa Adegoke, Marit Osayande · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.xzcpwq

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement deploys a printed short-code and QR disclosure instrument across 187 real-estate shopfront listings for fourteen weeks, finding that a randomised increase in sticker size left the scan rate unchanged and that only 9% of scans went on to use the linked comparison page's own before/after toggle, regardless of branch foot traffic.

Paper

Stopped Counting, Kept Fighting

Iben Chikere, Solveig Adeyemi · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.b8wknf

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement interviews a parent from each of 34 households about a shared household timeout-timer app, coding 71 logged sessions against each parent's account of when a sibling argument actually settled. The app's logged close matched the reported truce in under a third of sessions; a stricter, apology-contingent re-coding of the same sessions left the distribution largely unchanged.

Paper

Same Roster, Four Different Verdicts

Renke Sabel, Marit Osayande, Joost Nwosu · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.o8swbm

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement resubmits one week's unchanged casual-shift roster data to a rostering platform's fairness-compliance engine four times over twelve weeks, finding the score moves by an average of 9.7 points per re-run and 20 of 34 stores cross into a different compliance band at least once. Interviews with 21 store managers find 81% do not reopen the roster once a score is returned, and removing the instrument's heaviest-weighted criterion leaves the drift statistically unchanged.