Price Discovery at the Boundary of Contractual Decidability: Terminal-Value Gaps, Trading Availability, and Venue Finality on Kalshi

Abstract

This paper studies price discovery around contractual decidability rather than an arbitrary venue label. Its upstream lifecycle and decidability clocks are specified in Papers 7.1 and 7.3. Historical venue endpoints remain useful background: 152,694 ordinary markets form the retrospective feasibility denominator, 71,657 have an exact public endpoint, and 70,979 have an exact determination-to-endpoint pair. Those fields do not supply a contractual-decidability clock. The completed historical recovery produced no historically admissible contractual-decidability cohort. The prospective infrastructure shakedown has passed and evidence enrollment is active, but production price extraction has not started. The primary binary cohort will be drawn from the prospectively enrolled and blind-adjudicated contractual-decidability frame, with an accepted exact or interval first-decidability clock, exact terminal payoff, trading-availability classification, and admissible bounded non-block trade or real-candle coverage. Markets tradable after decidability enter a reaction cohort; markets closed before decidability enter a stale-terminal cohort. Closure is a competing event for convergence, not ordinary missingness. A 20-market price pilot may validate acquisition, block-trade treatment, synthetic-candle rejection, staleness, and clock alignment only after blind packet lock and only from accepted prospective clock candidates. It does not create price estimates. The paper specifies a prospective primary cohort and a targeted pilot protocol. Price estimation awaits independently reconstructed first/stable-decidability clocks and source-release clusters. No broad exchange-wide trade crawl or post hoc clock substitution is permitted.