Ostrom-Weighted Bootstrap: A Theoretically Optimal and Provably Complete Framework for Hierarchical Imputation in Multi-Agent Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Ostrom-Weighted Bootstrap, a hierarchical resampling method that achieves optimality, Bayesian interpretation, and guarantees complete data imputation in multi-agent systems.

Contribution

It presents the first resampling framework that combines BLUE optimality, Bayesian interpretation, empirical Bayes shrinkage, and zero-NaN guarantees for hierarchical imputation.

Findings

OWB is the Gauss--Markov BLUE under mild assumptions.

Ideal OWB coincides with the Bayesian posterior mean in hierarchical normal models.

Feasible OWB provides asymptotically valid confidence intervals and guarantees no NaN values.

Abstract

We study the statistical properties of the \emph{Ostrom-Weighted Bootstrap} (OWB), a hierarchical, variance-aware resampling scheme for imputing missing values and estimating archetypes in multi-agent voting data. At Level~1, under mild linear model assumptions, the \emph{ideal} OWB estimator -- with known persona-level (agent-level) variances -- is shown to be the Gauss--Markov best linear unbiased estimator (BLUE) and to strictly dominate uniform weighting whenever persona variances differ. At Level~2, within a canonical hierarchical normal model, the ideal OWB coincides with the conditional Bayesian posterior mean of the archetype. We then analyze the \emph{feasible} OWB, which replaces unknown variances with hierarchically pooled empirical estimates, and show that it can be interpreted as both a feasible generalized least-squares (FGLS) and an empirical-Bayes shrinkage estimator with asymptotically valid weighted bootstrap confidence intervals under mild regularity conditions. Finally, we establish a Zero-NaN Guarantee: as long as each petal has at least one finite observation, the OWB imputation algorithm produces strictly NaN-free completed data using only explicit, non-uniform bootstrap weights and never resorting to uniform sampling or numerical zero-filling. To our knowledge, OWB is the first resampling-based method that simultaneously achieves exact BLUE optimality, conditional Bayesian posterior mean interpretation, empirical Bayes shrinkage of precision parameters, asymptotic efficiency via FGLS, consistent weighted bootstrap inference, and provable zero-NaN completion under minimal data assumptions.