Week 9: Contract Design: Date / Exclusive / Official / Investment

Four named contract types past the commitment gate, what each one commits each party to, and why picking the wrong one is a design error, not a feelings error

19 April 2027

Once a commitment gate closes, the parties need a contract, and the model names four: Date (recurring, non-exclusive, low mutual obligation), Exclusive (recurring, closed to new positions, obligation still mostly informal), Official (exclusive plus externally declared — the contract now has third-party witnesses), and Investment (exclusive, declared, and structurally entangled — shared logistics, shared social graph, shared plans that assume duration). Each is a legitimate destination. The design error this week targets is picking one contract type while behaving as if you’d picked another — treating a Date-type arrangement with Investment-type expectations is the single most common source of the “we were never on the same page” complaint, and it’s fully preventable by naming the contract type out loud before assuming it.

Outline#

• the four contract types, what obligation and disclosure each one implies
• matching contract type to the dependency and specificity levels already measured for a case
• the case study portfolio: applying the full model (weeks 1–8’s variables) across a small set of cases, not just one
• what “use of the model’s terminology” means as a marking criterion, and why it’s weighted separately from analytical depth