Waiting Buys Exactly Two Moments: Endogenous Identification in Prediction-Driven Allocation

Online time-series forecasters receive labels only after horizon-dependent delays, while every adaptation step spends limited compute. We study when an online learner should update, not how to adapt at every opportunity, and introduce ADOWIP: a residual-adapter framework with sealed delay queues, exact budget accounting, and auditable update telemetry. Its main scheduler is an observed decision-loss priority gate that updates only after feedback is revealed, when downstream loss, optionally penalized by prediction MSE, exceeds a calibrated empirical quantile and budget remains. We prove hard-budget feasibility, projected-OGD regret for a convex linear accepted-update subproblem, and stability plus conditional finite-sample gate-selection statements. On public ETT capacity-planning tasks, a frozen calibration/evaluation split selects a gate that lowers held-out decision loss against always, fixed-period, and drift-triggered exact-update baselines under matched compute. Secondary threshold/load-index ETT suites are mixed: 33 of 41 selected contrasts clear the stricter cross-artifact Holm family, and the 8 nonpassing rows are explicitly excluded from primary claims. The same protocol improves an external UCI Bike capacity proxy with 20/0 held-out wins, and a fixed gate passes three full-year Capital Bikeshare station-rebalancing contrasts. Probe-based and finance experiments remain negative, delimiting the current scope of decision-prioritized adaptation.

Public service programs often allocate limited resources under uncertainty about their benefits, creating a need for randomization to support credible evaluation. In practice, however, applicants commonly enter waitlists where resources are prioritized toward individuals judged to have higher need through tiered priority queues, making direct randomization difficult. Motivated by this, we develop an experimental design framework for learning treatment effects while treating those most in need where incoming applicants are randomized into priority queues based on their assessed risk scores. Treatments are then provided across queues in priority order and first-in-first-out within queue as budget becomes available. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we characterize what causal effects are identified under this priority-queue allocation. When arrivals are exogenous, treatments are conditionally randomized, and hence standard estimands are identified; when arrivals are endogenous, queue randomization instead provides an instrument for treatment, identifying local treatment effects induced by the queuing process. Second, we develop optimized queue-assignment designs that trade off statistical efficiency against prioritizing higher-need applicants. We show in the process that, despite dependence in treatment assignments induced by the design, usual iid efficiency bounds remain well-justified design objectives. We illustrate the proposed designs using data from a housing allocation program in a large U.S. county.

Personal and organizational planning systems maintain two records that drift apart: what was planned (a task's effort budget) and what was done (a logged action's duration and description). Existing systems bridge them with an exclusive, all-or-nothing link that strands genuinely related but unlinked effort and reports false stalls on active goals. We formulate the bridge as a quasi-linear Fisher market: planned tasks are budget-constrained buyers, performed actions are divisible goods, and a fused text/structural/temporal signal sets each buyer's valuation. Two market instruments - a seller reserve price and a buyer cash option - yield conservation, a hard budget cap, and a provable junk filter as theorems. We extend the market with a concave completion utility discounting progress as a task nears its plan; standard convergence theory for the market's algorithm does not transfer here, resolved by a satiation-threshold fixed point with existence (Brouwer) and local uniqueness under an explicit diagonal-dominance condition, validated empirically on random and adversarial instances. A de-circularized, multi-seed benchmark - observed affinity corrupted independently of the scored ground truth - surfaces a genuine weak spot: the market's sharp, zero-entropy equilibrium is more sensitive to affinity noise than entropy-regularized optimal transport's permanently smoothed one. We resolve this with a one-parameter entropy-regularized generalization unifying the two, plus a noise-adaptive rule for its regularization strength. We report full reproducibility parameters, discuss limitations candidly, and relate the result to multi-touch attribution, optimal transport, and online Fisher-market algorithms.