Each concept is read twice: whether the approach carries it, and whether the approach's own sources claim it. A concept that is absent and was never claimed is a gap in the field rather than a failure of the work, and is marked out of scope.
Many centers under shared meta-rules
PartialNot claimedDefinition · Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty (1951)
Many independent decision centers, each acting on its own — but under one common framework of rules that all of them acknowledge. The shared framework is what makes it a system rather than a scatter.
Analysis
The centers half is carried unevenly and the common-framework half not at all. DGRO comes closest: each online community is a real bounded body whose own accepted content sets the standard its responses are judged against, so distinct standards genuinely govern distinct traffic. But in the personalization branch of the heterogeneous-feedback paper the 'centers' are latent clusters or learned representations recovered from pooled feedback — partitions the modeller chose, which decide nothing and which no one can join, contest, or leave, so they are centers only in the bookkeeping sense. Above either kind there is no framework of rules the centers acknowledge: the utilitarian and Leximin rules in the aggregation branch are not a common framework the centers act under, they are a scalarizing step that replaces the centers with one model, and no source proposes ground rules binding the party doing the partitioning.
Overlapping jurisdiction
AbsentNot claimed · out of scopeDefinition · Vincent Ostrom, Tiebout & Warren (1961)
The centers' authority overlaps on purpose — the same case can fall under more than one — and the friction between them is treated as a feature, worked out through interaction rather than prevented by a clean division of turf.
Analysis
The defining move of this strategy is the opposite of overlapping authority: a response aimed at group A is scored by A's measure and by nothing else, so no case ever falls under two standards and the friction Ostrom treats as productive has no occasion to arise. Communities in DGRO are disjoint by construction, and cluster or user assignment in the heterogeneous-feedback paper routes each case to one reward model. The nearest approach to overlap is that paper's aggregation branch, where every per-group reward bears on every output — but the contention is settled in advance by a fixed welfare formula rather than worked out through interaction between the centers, and that branch abolishes the separate centers rather than letting them collide. The method papers' own divergence notes concede the absence rather than claiming it.
Subsidiarity and nesting
AbsentNot claimed · out of scopeDefinition · Johannes Althusius (1603); Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990)
Decisions are made at the most local level capable of making them, and local units nest inside larger ones that handle what the local level cannot. Authority is layered — neither centralized nor flatly fragmented.
Analysis
There is one flat tier of groups and nothing above or below it: no larger unit takes up what a community cannot settle, and nothing assigns a given decision to the most local level competent to make it — the partition is fixed once, by the modeller, at a single grain. The heterogeneous-feedback paper does put a second tier over the per-cluster reward models via utilitarian or Leximin aggregation, but that tier supersedes the local models on every case instead of handling only their residue, and it is offered as an alternative branch to personalization, not as a layer sitting above it. DGRO has no supra-community layer at all, and the decentralization argument in the position paper stops at 'not one lab' without saying which questions belong at which level.