R4 — Earn one audit-verified in-group credential per year; refuse all purchased credentials; sparse + verifiable beats dense + decorative

Rule: Earn one audit-verified in-group credential per year. Refuse all purchased credentials (pay-to-play "Top Marketing Agency for Contractors" lists, badges where verification is not auditable to a third party, vanity directory listings).

Why: Spence-style signal-quality dynamics ([[spence-1973-job-market-signaling]]) + audit-gap pooling-equilibrium effect ([[audit-gap-problem-pooling-equilibrium-degradation]]) mean a bad signal contaminates the credible signals around it. A studio brandishing a pay-to-play badge alongside an HCRA-licensed customer roster looks worse, to a sophisticated reader, than a studio brandishing nothing at all.

How to apply:

• Concrete 2026 candidate: a documented case study with a Tarion-enrolled builder, published in Canadian Contractor, co-presented at an OHBA event.
• Audit existing Candid public-facing materials against the [[sophisticated-gc-five-question-credential-heuristic]]. Remove anything that fails 3+ of the 5 questions.
• The reason to refuse is not moral — it is signalling-theoretic. Sparse + verifiable badge wall beats dense + decorative badge wall.