The Contribution Criterion: Scoring Policies and Organisations by Their Effect on System-Level Digital Sovereignty¶

Stefane Fermigier (Abilian) · sf@abilian.com

Draft working paper v0.5, 2026-09-18. Prepared for publication: the citations to the programme corpus now carry the published addresses of the papers they name, with ten stale version pins corrected and one broken path repaired; the one source not yet published is flagged as such in place. A prose pass brought the document's coordination and antithesis rates inside the corpus's own range. Revised after two referee rounds, the second by an independent reviewer given only the papers: the proof of Proposition 1 now closes its local-to-global step, with the planner-corner claim corrected to its exact threshold (both verified in verify/claim1.py). The sign-transfer lemma is restated with its hypotheses in full. The assembled model is stated completely in this paper. Facts carrying open verification flags are marked in place.

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Abstract¶

Every deployed sovereignty instrument scores a node: an organisation's own resilience, a supplier's own posture, an offer's own compliance level. This paper defines the complementary object: the contribution of a policy or an organisation, the change in the system's sovereignty stock under a stated counterfactual replacement of the entity's realized actions. Four rules discipline the definition: only realized mechanisms score, a sign verdict requires agreement across the canonical counterfactuals, conduct is scored over a stated window, and every claim inherits the weakest evidence tier on its path.

The formal core is classical: in a layered adoption market with consistency effects, the equilibrium under-adopts relative to the adopter-welfare optimum, the textbook network-externality mechanism (Katz and Shapiro 1985; Farrell and Saloner 1985; the lineage runs to Rohlfs 1974). The paper adds the closed form of the wedge in this reference parameterization, $2\gamma \int_c^1 a\, dG$ evaluated at the equilibrium cutoff, and exact thresholds for when the result holds under a fuller welfare ledger: a local threshold at the equilibrium and a corner threshold at universal adoption, both verified. The structural reading is that node-scoped instruments cannot register the wedge, because it lives on other nodes, whichever way the scores point. A sign-transfer lemma with explicit hypotheses connects the computable definition to two applied screens. Three worked cases exercise them with stated, sign-checked counterfactuals: a suite-bundling conduct scores negative through a mechanism invisible to every node instrument, with one countervailing lower-tier path recorded; the commitments ending it score positive with a receipted timing discount; and a full-funding maintenance programme scores positive, provisionally, exactly where the standard leverage statistic returns nothing.

Keywords: digital sovereignty, policy evaluation, contribution analysis, network externalities, procurement, bundling.

JEL: F52, L86, D62, O25.

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Fermigier, S. (2026). The Contribution Criterion: Scoring Policies and Organisations by Their Effect on System-Level Digital Sovereignty.
Draft working paper v0.5, Abilian Econ Lab.
https://econ.lab.abilian.com/papers/contribution-criterion/