feat: add Assured Action economy protocol

[safal207]

What changed

Adds the first executable ProofPath Assured Action Economy v0.1 contract on top of the Deploy Evidence Builder from #208.

The new flow is:

funded verification job
        ↓ fixed-rate independent assignments
witness commit
        ↓
witness reveal
        ↓ exact quorum or honest dissent
challenge window and disputes
        ↓
deterministic settlement receipt
        ↓
external payment provider

The implementation adds:

• a dependency-free strict-JSON economy evaluator;
• normative schemas for economy bundles and settlement receipts;
• fixed-rate witness assignments with exact integer-minor-unit accounting;
• risk-class quorum, control-domain, and implementation-diversity thresholds;
• commit/reveal binding for verdict, clearance root, evidence root, admission receipt, and nonce;
• deterministic job, bundle, commitment, and settlement roots;
• honest-dissent handling without automatic slashing;
• open-dispute and challenge-window settlement locks;
• a committed three-witness reference job;
• 20 focused unit, mutation, incentive, integrity, and CLI tests;
• a GitHub Actions conformance workflow with four signed scenarios;
• product and trust-boundary documentation.

Economic integrity

The customer-funded allocation must conserve exactly:

sum(witness payouts)
+ platform fee
+ dispute reserve
= customer charge

The reference $100.00 job allocates:

$54.00  witnesses
$16.00  dispute reserve
$30.00  ProofPath platform fee

Any one-unit mismatch is BLOCK / ECONOMY_BUDGET_NOT_CONSERVED.

The v0.1 contract uses FIXED_RATE_NO_AUCTION so operator selection cannot degrade into a lowest-bid race.

Incentive boundary

Verification work is paid independently of the action outcome.

If all valid witnesses correctly agree that an action must be blocked:

action verdict:    BLOCK
economy decision:  ACCEPT
settlement state:  READY_FOR_EXTERNAL_PAYMENT_REQUEST

This prevents the network from rewarding approvals instead of reproducible verification.

Meaningful witness disagreement produces:

HOLD / ECONOMY_WITNESS_DISSENT_REQUIRES_REVIEW
slashing_performed: false

A minority verdict is not automatic evidence of fraud.

Security behavior

The evaluator rejects or holds:

• false control-domain independence;
• insufficient verifier implementation diversity;
• funding-allocation drift;
• job-root substitution;
• unassigned witnesses;
• commitment or reveal equivocation;
• commitment/reveal mismatch;
• clearance-root substitution;
• admission-receipt substitution;
• missing quorum;
• open challenge windows;
• open disputes.

Decision precedence remains:

CHALLENGE > BLOCK > HOLD > ACCEPT

Honest assurance boundary

Every settlement receipt states:

external_payment_authority_granted: false
payment_execution_performed: false
slashing_performed: false
coverage: NOT_FINANCIALLY_COVERED

The evaluator does not hold funds, invoke a payment provider, provide insurance, prove beneficial-owner independence, or independently verify upstream Sigstore attestations. It creates a deterministic plan that a separately authorized payment integration may consume.

Validation

Passed locally:

python3 -m unittest tests.test_assured_action_economy -v
20 tests — OK

python3 -m unittest discover -s tests -p 'test_*.py'
188 tests — OK

git diff --cached --check
no errors

The new workflow also generates and keyless-attests four settlement scenarios:

• agreed action ACCEPT → economy ACCEPT;
• agreed action BLOCK → economy ACCEPT;
• honest dissent → economy HOLD;
• reveal substitution → economy CHALLENGE.

Stacked PR

Base: agent/proofpath-deploy-evidence-builder-v0.1 / #208

No merge is performed by this PR.

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