Media Brief · Human Agency Under Consequential State
What journalists need to know about OD-HAS
Micheal Charles Preble · Independent Researcher · Research paper (not the policy paper)
Why this research matters
When a record about a person is corrected, the correction doesn't automatically resolve what happens to decisions or consequences already produced from the old information. This research studies that gap directly, using real public-record cases.
The research in one sentence
Human Agency Under Consequential State (OD-HAS) is a framework for the interval after a source record changes but before its downstream consequences have been resolved, tested against 25 real consumer-complaint records and 20 real federal-employment appeal chains.
What is new
A shared vocabulary — state change, propagation, revalidation, disposition, recoverable effects — for a problem usually handled piecemeal by privacy law, consumer-reporting law, and administrative law separately. Two real empirical pilots applying that vocabulary to public records.
What is established vs. proposed
Established by this paper's own pilots: in the 25 CFPB complaint narratives examined, whether a materially distinct replacement basis existed could not be determined from the public record in any case (25/25 unknown). In the 20 MSPB chains examined, that same question was answerable in all 20 cases, but the authority and timing governing any interim period could not be determined from the public record in any case.
Proposed: the OD-HAS framework itself, as a way of organizing this problem across domains. It has not been validated as law and does not predict institutional outcomes.
What would be inaccurate to say
- That the CFPB or MSPB records show institutions are hiding a replacement basis. The finding is that the public record does not expose enough information to tell — “unknown” is not the same as “no.”
- That 19 of 20 MSPB chains lacking a distinct replacement ground is a general finding about how often institutions rebase decisions. It is specific to this small, selected sample.
- That the search for a third corpus proves no complete public example exists. The search closed because it did not find one within its frozen scope, not because it proved none exists.
- That the framework has been adopted, validated as law, or shown to predict outcomes. None of that is claimed.
Canonical source / citation
Read the canonical paper record → · Full paper PDF · View on SSRN
Preble, Micheal Charles. “Human Agency Under Consequential State: Correction, Revalidation, and Recoverable Consequences in Persistent Computational Systems” Manuscript dated September 21, 2026. Available at SSRN 7496758, 2026.
Researcher contact
Micheal Charles Preble · Independent Researcher · micheal@perfinitive.com · ORCID
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