Scenario. A state's department of child welfare is about to issue its next four-year contract for family support services — visits, case management, parenting programs. The last contract rewarded caseload and visit counts. The results, as every caseworker knows and every director knows, have been measured hours and no fewer kids bouncing between foster homes. The new commissioner, Julian, wants to try something different: pool the money, specify outcomes families actually care about — a sibling group kept together, a grandparent reached — and let providers bid on those outcomes, with verification handled by a party that isn't the provider and isn't the state. He needs a procurement mechanism that exists and that his counsel will sign off on.

Challenge: Design an outcome-based, socialized-pool procurement mechanism for a category of national- or state-scale public spending — specifying how outcomes are defined, how providers bid, and how an independent party verifies results — that the buyer's counsel could actually adopt.

Evaluation. A strong design holds up across a heterogeneous demand base and resists incumbent-supplier capture, while keeping pool solvency compatible with public budgeting rules.