Rewrites Section III-G (Unit of Analysis and Summary Statistics) after
self-review identified three logical issues in v3.10:
1. Ordering inversion: the three units are now ordered signature ->
auditor-year -> accountant, with auditor-year as the principled
middle unit under within-year assumptions and accountant as a
deliberate cross-year pooling.
2. Oversold assumption: the old "within-auditor-year no-mixing
identification assumption" is split into A1 (pair-detectability,
weak statistical, cross-year scope matching the detector) and A2
(within-year label uniformity, interpretive convention). The
arithmetic statistics reported in the paper do not require A2; A2
only underwrites interpretive readings (notably IV-H.1's partner-
level "minority of hand-signers" framing).
3. Motivation-assumption mismatch: removed the "longitudinal behaviour
of interest" framing and explicitly disclaimed across-year
homogeneity. Accountant-level coordinates are now described as a
pooled observed tendency rather than a time-invariant regime.
Propagated implications across Introduction, Discussion, and Results:
softened "tends to cluster into a dominant regime" and "directly
quantifying the minority of hand-signers" to "pooled observed
tendency" / "consistent with within-firm heterogeneity"; rewrote the
Limitations fifth point (was "treats all signatures from a CPA as
a single class"); added a seventh Limitation acknowledging the
source-template edge case; added a per-signature best-match cross-year
caveat to Section IV-H.2; softened IV-H.2's "direct consequence" to
"consistent with"; reframed pixel-identity anchor as pair-level proof
of image reuse (with source-template exception) rather than absolute
signature-level positive.
Process: self-review (9 findings) -> full-pass fixes -> codex
gpt-5.5 xhigh round-10 verification (8 RESOLVED, 1 PARTIAL, 4 MINOR
regression findings) -> regression fixes.
No re-computation. All tables (IV-XVIII) and Appendix A numbers
unchanged. Abstract at 248/250 words.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
gbanyan
d2f8673a67