Conditional Disclosure as a Coordination Device
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摘要
This paper develops social assurance contracts as a mechanism to form publicly identifiable coalitions when private support exists but public expression is costly, by conditioning disclosure on a threshold of signatures. It argues that measurement alone cannot select among expression equilibria; the contract generates a closed-form selection gap equal to the safety-in-numbers exposure tail, net of friction [page::11][page::13]. By deriving deterministic threshold release rules and the role of failure privacy, the model shows how disclosure rules can convert latent support into a named coalition and expand the public expressibility frontier when publication is good news [page::16][page::17][page::20]. Leakage of failed lists can erode the advantage, with a precise flip condition that delineates when leakage reduces participation versus when it might attract it, and guaranteed failed-list release reduces the contract to open expression plus friction [page::18]. The framework is applied to corporate whistleblowing, labor organizing, and threshold pledges, illustrating how a named coalition is formed without creating movement from nothing, and highlighting normative tradeoffs between safety, confidentiality, and social coordination [page::26][page::27]. The analysis concludes that information alone cannot substitute for conditional named disclosure in exposure-driven silence, and the threshold design together with failure privacy determines the mechanism’s scope and effectiveness [page::29].
