Feasible-Set Governance: Framework Overview

A cross-domain governance framework for analyzing not only how people choose, but how the candidate universe from which they choose is structured in advance.

Overview

Feasible Set Governance (FSG) is an upper-order analytical framework for examining who structures the feasible set within which bounded actors decide, whose goals that structure reflects, and whether affected actors can perceive, refuse, exit, or contest it.

The framework starts from bounded rationality as a background condition, but shifts the main analytic question upstream: before choice happens, who shaped the candidate set itself?

Core Claim

Modern power often operates less by dictating final choices directly than by pre-structuring the feasible set from which those choices later emerge.

FSG therefore asks not only whether actors choose well, but:

1. Who sets the feasible set?
2. Whose goals are embedded in it?
3. Can affected actors recognize that structuring?
4. Is acceptance merely formal or substantively meaningful?
5. Are alternatives and exit nominal or real?
6. Can the structure be contested or revised?

Why This Framework Exists

Many adjacent literatures already examine parts of this problem: online choice architecture, recommender systems, consent and data agency, autonomy, and contestability. But these issues are often treated as adjacent or separate rather than as parts of one integrated governance sequence.

FSG brings those dimensions together into a single framework centered on the governance of the candidate set itself.

Six Analytical Axes

1. Set-Setting Power

Who determines the boundaries and form of the candidate set from which choice becomes possible?

2. Goal Alignment

Does the structured set reflect the actor’s own substantive goals, or the optimization logic of an intermediary, institution, or platform?

3. Awareness / Legibility

Can affected actors recognize that the feasible set has been structured, and how that structuring works?

4. Consent Quality

Is acceptance merely formal, or substantively meaningful under realistic conditions of comprehension and refusal?

5. Substitutability / Exit

Are alternatives and withdrawal only nominal, or practically accessible under real conditions?

6. Countervailing Capacity

Can individuals or collectives meaningfully contest, revise, or pressure the system that structures the set?

Mechanism

Environmental complexity
→ bounded rationality
→ feasible set necessity
→ set-setting by intermediary / institution / infrastructure
→ filtered candidate universe
→ attention and evaluation
→ selection
→ outcome distribution
→ feedback, lock-in, or contestation

The framework therefore shifts analysis one step earlier than ordinary choice analysis. The key issue is not only what decision is made, but how the universe of decision-relevant candidates was already reduced and formatted before deliberate choice begins.

What FSG Is Not

FSG is not simply a rebranding of bounded rationality.
It is not reducible to choice architecture, consent theory, or contestability literature alone.
It does not claim that all structured feasible sets are illegitimate.
It does not infer legitimacy from formal consent or formal alternatives alone.

Its contribution lies in integration: linking set-setting, alignment, legibility, consent, substantive exit, and contestation into one coherent governance problem.

Domains of Application

FSG can be applied across multiple domains, including:

• platform ranking and recommendation
• AI-mediated or delegated decision settings
• recruitment and eligibility infrastructures
• labour-market narrowing and occupational filtering
• asset access and accumulation paths
• digitally structured connection and boundary environments
• authentication-bound access infrastructures

In this sense, FSG functions as a cross-domain scaffold rather than a single narrow theory tied to one field.

Current Status

FSG is currently a draft-backed framework supported by a main conceptual document, an adjacent literatures map, and an initial case file. Its current public-facing strength lies in its core definition, six-axis structure, governance tests, and domain illustrations.

It should not yet be presented as a fully validated empirical model. The strongest public claim is that it offers an integrated framework for analyzing how externally structured feasible sets become a governance problem across domains.

Related Work

• When Disconnection Is Not Exit: Authentication, Phone Access, and Digitally Imposed Availability
• Adjacent literatures map
• Initial case examples
• Domain-specific extensions and related framework notes

Citation Note

This page presents a public-facing summary of an ongoing framework under development.