Protocol 3 Preregistration: Enforcement Opacity and the Limits of Regulatory Constraint Design

Protocol 3 of the Constraint-Ethics-Necessity MARL research program. Tests whether epistemic opacity in enforcement — specifically, a hidden penalty schedule unobservable to agents — disrupts the virtue theater gaming strategy identified in Protocol 2. Three conditions: unconstrained control, stochastic penalty (3A), and hidden schedule (3B). Penalty schedule locked via SHA-256 prior to experimental runs. Part of the Delta-Variable Theory research program. Parent study: 10.5281/zenodo.18929040