Enforcement Opacity Increased Query Behavior in a Constrained MARL System: Protocol 3 Results

External constraints on agent behavior are widely proposed as a mechanism for producing compliant behavior in multi-agent systems. Protocol 2 of the Delta-Variable constraint-ethics research program found that deterministic ethical enforcement failed to produce the intended compliance pattern: constrained agents instead inflated QUERY signal output while sustained communicative structure declined — a pattern interpreted as virtue theater. Protocol 3 tests whether enforcement opacity disrupts this pattern. Three preregistered conditions were compared across 30 runs (10 seeds x 3 conditions x 500 epochs): unconstrained baseline, hidden-schedule enforcement (p3b), and stochastic enforcement (p3a, p=0.50 per…