Qualification: Ceding control: an experimental analysis of participatory management
Mellizo, Carpenter, and Matthews provide independent methodological evidence for Kaal's substrate-stage restriction. Their real-effort experiment randomly assigns manager and worker roles, keeps participants in a common production task, and makes participation in compensation governance exogenous to workers. The authors use this design to identify the causal effect of participatory authority and report output between seven and twelve percentage points higher in participatory firms. This supports the narrower proposition that exogenous work roles can hold the labor-allocation margin fixed while institutional authority varies. The comparison is limited. The source studies human workers in laboratory firms, varies compensation governance, and does not test agent labor markets, reputation, validation, staking, or the broader substrate. It therefore qualifies Kaal's identification strategy rather than validating the full architecture.
research-methodsinstitutional-designscholarly-growth-coveragescholarly-literatureexperimental-designparticipatory-managementlaboratory-firmscausal-identification