No equity, no contingent fees
We take no equity in, and no contingent fees from, any party we evaluate. Where a participation fee exists it is published and identical for every participant in that evaluation. There is no arrangement under which a better result is worth more to us than a worse one.
We do not write what we then assess
We do not author a specification, a submission or a remediation for a party we evaluate. Criteria are authored by the party whose decision the evaluation informs, and the authorship is a published field on the pre-registration, whoever wrote them.
Our own commercial position is disclosed and countersigned
Conflict rules usually cover individual assessors. The conflict that matters in this market is between the evaluator as a business and the party being evaluated, because we sell to some of the same buyers. So every pre-registration carries a published disclosure of our commercial relationship with each subject, with no confidential variant. Declaring none is an affirmative statement carrying a signature, not an omission.
And the classification is countersigned by the party whose decision it is, because we are the party with an incentive to understate it. Unchecked self-attestation by the interested party is the defect this company exists to attack, and it cannot sit at the centre of our own method.
Where a subject is a competitor, we do not score it
If our disclosed relationship with a subject is competitive, that evaluation may not produce a score, a rank or a comparative statement about them. It may proceed as a published methodology with no scored subject, or not at all. This is structural rather than a judgement we make case by case, and it binds us even where nobody would have noticed.
Anyone named may contest the classification
Misclassifying a relationship in order to unlock a score would be the obvious way to defeat the rule above. So misclassification is an admissible ground of challenge in every evaluation, and standing extends to any party named in the disclosure, whether or not they took part.
What is public regardless of who is paying
The pre-registration and its hash, the harness, the ledger roots, the existence of the evaluation with its date and scope, every recorded deviation, and the existence and outcome of every challenge. A client may negotiate confidentiality over results. No client may acquire the right to suppress a deviation, a challenge, or the fact that a completed evaluation happened.
An evaluation abandoned before it is scored is published as abandoned, with the date. Silent abandonment defeats the point of committing to criteria in advance.