Concepts
Confidence
How the confidence score is computed, the thresholds that gate a recommendation, and when the system abstains entirely.
Confidence is a decision control, not a badge. It determines whether a recommendation can be acted on at all.
The principle: weak evidence should produce a request for better data, not a confident-looking guess.
The bands
| Score | Level | Decision |
|---|---|---|
| below 0.40 | Very Low | Abstain |
| 0.40 – 0.59 | Low | Abstain |
| 0.60 – 0.74 | Medium | Provisional |
| 0.75 – 0.89 | High | Normal |
| 0.90 and above | Very High | Normal |
Abstain means no change is recommended. The screen shows what evidence is missing instead of a number you should not trust.
Provisional means the recommendation is shown, identified as provisional, and requires explicit acknowledgement. The intent is a smaller staged change rather than the full move.
Normal means it can proceed through ordinary review.
How the score is computed
Five weighted components, each between 0 and 1:
| Component | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Data coverage | 0.35 | How many of the three economic inputs are present (PPP, price level, income). |
| Freshness | 0.20 | How recent the economic observations are. |
| Store support | 0.20 | Whether the store actually supports pricing in this market. |
| Rounding rule | 0.10 | Whether a rounding increment is known for the market's currency. |
| Stability | 0.15 | How far the adjusted factor sits from 1.0 — a large move is a less certain one. |
The result is rounded to two decimal places.
Data coverage carries the most weight because it is the component most often at fault. A market with only PPP and no income or price-level data scores 1/3 on coverage, which alone costs it 0.23 of the total.
The 5% floor
Separately from confidence, a recommendation whose change is smaller than 5% is not surfaced. Below that threshold the change is within the noise of rounding and exchange-rate movement, and acting on it costs more attention than it returns.
This is why a market can show a different parity target in the matrix without generating a recommendation.
What makes a recommendation approvable
All four must hold:
- status is open;
- the product has not been withdrawn from the store;
- the confidence decision is not abstain;
- the absolute change is at least 5%.
The interface checks these before enabling the button, and the server enforces them again on submission. Approving a batch reports each skipped item individually with its reason — a reviewer who selected forty needs to know which ones did not go through.
What is not implemented
Three parts of the confidence design are specified but not built:
- Visible components. Today the score is shown; its five parts are not broken out on screen.
- Higher thresholds for protected or high-revenue markets. The bands are currently global.
- Calibration against observed outcomes. The score has never been checked against what actually happened after a price change, because outcome measurement is not built. Treat it as a measure of evidence quality, not of predicted success.