Rule: prefer peer-reviewed / award-vetted magnitudes (Edelman, NBER, INFORMS) over vendor-recycled figures

Rule. When a magnitude figure is available in both a peer-reviewed / award-vetted source and a vendor-recycled secondary form, cite the former — even when the secondary is more rhetorically convenient.

Why. Award-vetted sources (American Airlines yield management — $1.4B over 3 years, ~5-7pct incremental revenue, Franz Edelman Award 1991 (Smith Leimkuhler Darrow, Interfaces 1992)) and primary academic sources (NBER WP 29840 (Di Maggio, Ratnadiwakara, Carmichael, 2022) — "Invisible Primes: Fintech Lending with Alternative Data", Stigler 1961 — "The Economics of Information"; costly search produces price dispersion (JPE 69:213-225), Akerlof 1970 — "The Market for Lemons"; asymmetric information can collapse markets (Nobel 2001)) have qualifying conditions intact; vendor-recycled versions tend to strip them. The source-incentive asymmetry is well-documented in the sister briefs (Caveats for the data-driven-tools brief: vendor self-reporting on conversion; enterprise-scale benchmarks; named-user quotes; macro projections).

How to apply. Default sourcing hierarchy for any Candid edge claim: (1) peer-reviewed primary, (2) award-vetted (Edelman / equivalent), (3) multilateral / Crown-corp with named incentive flag, (4) trade press citing named executives, (5) vendor self-report — only with explicit attribution and only as direction, never as magnitude. Drop anything below level 5.