Game theory and mechanism design¶
The thread that models the instruments themselves: what procurement screens can screen, how the layered structure of the cloud market defeats the obvious levers, and why the same Union wrote opposite rules for Chinese telecom vendors and US cloud providers. Every proposition carries a numerical check in the project's verification suite, and the interactive models recompute the verified code live.
Screening for Sovereignty¶
The core mechanism-design paper: procurement when compliance is cheap to fake and costly to verify. Five theorems, among them: a requirement screens only if it targets an attribute the genuine and the pretender satisfy at different cost and the buyer can verify (residency and operational audits fail outright, at any price and any audit intensity); the cost-minimizing audit is a cascade over attributes; and the accuracy a screen needs is set by the richest would-be pretender. Fifteen-plus numerical checks, all passing.
Cheaper and Losing: A Layered Model of Cloud Dependence and the Limits of Subsidy¶
Why several-times-cheaper European cloud keeps losing share: buyers sort by how much of their needs are differentiated, the differentiated layer runs on network effects, and firms drift up-stack over their lifecycle, so the US share climbs on its own. A commodity subsidy saturates on the measured, bimodal firm population; the levers that work are un-bundling and cutting cross-provider coupling costs, which is what the Data Act's egress rules do. Seven propositions, proved, cross-checked, and Monte-Carlo stress-tested. Play it live.
Exit or Own? Portability Mandates and Ownership Screens¶
Two policies usually argued as rivals are complements with an exact band: an exit mandate cuts the lock-in rents a fake champion would capture, so the ownership screen needs less audit accuracy, and for a whole range of realistic verification capability the screen works only with the mandate beside it. Below the band, neither reaches the exposure, and the paper says so in policy language: portability there is a consolation, and calling the workload protected is a category error.
Two Screenings: Why Europe Screened Huawei but not the Hyperscalers¶
The comparative case. Against Chinese vendors, structural criteria passed at design and eroded quietly in national enforcement; against US cloud, structural criteria were deleted in a low-salience drafting room and behavioural non-screens remained. The explanation runs on two variables, verifiability of the decisive attribute and where the losing coalition can spend its influence, and it makes three predictions, each with a live falsifier, confronted with the post-2024 record.