Piecework prices its errors

Claim (verbatim)

Piecework prices its errors. The Nara sutra-copying bureau ran a complete incentive scheme that survives as paperwork: scribes paid per sheet, proofreaders paid to catch faults, pay docked per uncaught error under a written deduction schedule. That is a speed-accuracy market, and it should have an interior optimum visible in the ledgers: across named scribes, output rate and fault rate positively correlated (the frontier), and the distribution of per-scribe fault rates compressed just below the threshold where the fines bite — eighth-century workers optimizing against a fee schedule, recoverable scribe by scribe from the payroll.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

From the copying-bureau ledgers (sheets assigned and completed per day, proofreaders' fault tallies per scribe), for scribes with at least 20 attested work-days: Primary clause (verdict follows it): the across-scribe rank correlation between mean daily sheet output and faults per 100 sheets is positive with rho at least 0.4. Secondary: the per-scribe fault-rate distribution shows excess mass just below the documented deduction threshold rather than a smooth right tail.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Shosoin documents (Shosoin monjo) as transcribed in Dai Nihon Komonjo and databased by the Shosoin Office and the National Institute of Japanese Literature — the sutra-scriptorium payroll and proofreading records form the core of the corpus.

Novelty / leakage triage

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).

The incentive scheme is documented in detail: the Nara Office of Sutra Transcription (shakyojo) paid scribes by the sheet (the fastest exceeding thirteen a day), had proofreaders check against the exemplar, and docked pay for uncaught errors under a written schedule -- Bryan Lowe's Ritualized Writing reconstructs exactly this speed-accuracy market from the Shosoin documents. Not located: the item's specific ECONOMETRIC signature -- an across-scribe positive rank correlation (rho >=0.4) between mean daily sheet output and faults per 100 sheets (the frontier), and a per-scribe fault-rate distribution with excess mass just below the deduction threshold rather than a smooth right tail. The payroll-and-penalty scheme is established; the interior-optimum measurement scribe-by-scribe is unrun.

• Bryan D. Lowe, Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2017); 'Scribes and Purity in Eighth-Century Japan' — The Nara scriptorium's pay-per-sheet, proofreading, and error-docking scheme -- the established incentive market
• Shosoin monjo transcribed in Dai Nihon Komonjo and databased by the Shosoin Office / NIJL (scriptorium payroll and proofreading tallies) — The kill dataset for the output-vs-fault correlation and threshold-clustering test

Predictions

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