The Authorisation Bottleneck
Maintaining delegated authority under shared review capacity
Abstract
Standing authority lets routine work proceed without repeated human approval. Its value depends on remaining usable: when the conditions of a mandate change, someone must review and renew it. If the same people also approve individual cases, clearing the immediate backlog can prevent the renewal that would reduce future review work. This paper models that conflict. A reviewer divides effort between cases and restoring a policy that authorises an eligible share of future arrivals. The model gives an exact capacity frontier and a strict lower bound on the protected renewal share within a constant-allocation policy class. Where renewal expands capacity, there is a range of workloads that protected renewal can sustain but strict case-first review cannot. Below ordinary review capacity, however, case-first renewal weakly improves backlog relative to ordinary review, while immediate renewal can increase delay. A finite backlog trigger retains the capacity guarantee while permitting case priority below the trigger; a worst-case certificate covers stated parameter uncertainty. Allocation must still reflect workload and service requirements. The results are proved in a minimal model and checked by separate numerical implementations. They generate testable predictions about renewal effort, policy availability and backlog; they do not establish organisational prevalence or decision quality.