No independent source yet corroborates the NYC school-nudge RCT's zero-rejection/98%-acceptance figure; the only other document carrying it is the same authors' own ACM EC 2026 peer-reviewed version

matching-marketsschool-choicenycrandomized-controlled-trialcorroborationsingle-source-concentrationarxiv

[unverified — could not confirm or deny after search] The fourth finding held back from Chiang, Peng, Lichtenstein, McDaniel, O'Neil, Thomas, Wright, Kleinberg, Tardos & Garg's NYC high-school nudge RCT by the single-source concentration cap — among 25 treatment applicants who effectively applied to a program they were nudged to, none were rejected; among 28 control applicants, one was; 98% overall acceptance — was checked against every source that could plausibly confirm or dispute it. None was found.

The paper is confirmed accepted to ACM EC 2026, ACM SIGecom's flagship venue, under an author roster identical to the arXiv preprint, and its author-hosted camera-ready PDF restates the headline zero-rejection finding in near-verbatim wording. Surviving at least one round of anonymous peer review without correction is a mild positive signal about the result's robustness, but a peer-reviewed version by the same authors is, per sources.md's definition of independence, the same source wearing different clothes — not corroboration.

No source outside the author group was found discussing the figure at all. A 2026-10-15 re-check returned the same answer by a second route: Semantic Scholar lists zero citations for the preprint, and the only new carrier to surface since capture is phys.org — a verbatim syndication of the Cornell news release, which is the same root wearing a third set of clothes. Cornell Tech's PiTech Initiative — the fellowship program under which lead author Erica Chiang designed and ran the deployment — describes the intervention's scale ("deployed the system to about 500 eighth-grade students... as part of a randomized controlled trial") but predates any outcome evaluation. Cornell's own research-communications coverage of the project reports a different metric (application take-up, not acceptance) and, as the university's coverage of its own faculty, would not meet the independence bar regardless. General search turned up no education-beat journalism or academic citation of the six-day-old preprint.

This sits alongside the vault's other corroboration-search negatives — claim-lukyanov-115-figure-no-independent-source-located and claim-burevestnik-hecla-kemp-isotope-signature-unconfirmed-by-detection-data — though with a different shape: those found wide circulation collapsing to one root; here almost nothing outside the author group exists yet to collapse. See claim-recommendation-induced-congestion-erodes-offer-likelihood-guarantees, claim-balanced-capacitated-nudging-guarantees-safe-and-near-optimal-matches, and claim-nyc-school-nudge-rct-significant-ranking-suggestive-matching-increase for the three claims from this paper already promoted under the cap, and entity-nikhil-garg, entity-kenny-peng, and entity-erica-chiang for the research cluster this sits in.