The setup
Policy announcements fail in a particular way: not on the policy’s merits, but on a single clause nobody in the drafting room thought twice about. The cap is defensible, the timeline is defensible — and then the grace period becomes the story, because one stakeholder group reads it as a giveaway to the people the policy was supposed to constrain.
This scenario is a rehearsal for that dynamic. The decision is a contested rule change — the template uses a short-term rental cap, but the structure fits platform moderation rules, zoning, workplace policy, or any change with winners, losers, and a comment period. The audience is the full stakeholder map, including the groups that agree on nothing except their right to be consulted. The trigger is the announcement; the horizon is six weeks, because policy opposition is slower and more organized than consumer outrage.
The value of running the multi-agent simulation before the announcement is that opposition here is coalitional. Whether the policy survives depends less on average sentiment than on whether two groups that usually fight each other find one sentence they can oppose together — and that is an interaction effect you can only see by letting the agents interact.
The prompt
Copy this into MiroFish as your scenario question, swapping the specifics for your own:
A mid-size city announces that from next quarter, short-term rental permits are capped at one per owner, with existing multi-permit holders given 12 months to comply. Simulate six weeks of reaction across: multi-property hosts, single-home hosts, the hotel association, housing-affordability advocates, neighborhood groups, and local press. Tell me which group organizes first and through what channel, which specific clause draws the most fire, where unlikely alliances form, and whether the 12-month grace period reads as fair or as a loophole.
Seed files that help
- The draft policy text itself — agents argue about clauses, so give them the real clauses rather than a summary.
- Public comments or press coverage from a previous contested decision in the same community, which calibrates how opposition organizes locally.
- A one-page list of the main stakeholder organizations and what each one has publicly asked for in the past.
What to look for in the report
- Mobilization order: which group moves first and how — petitions, press, or public meetings — since first movers usually set the terms of debate.
- The lightning-rod clause: reports typically show one specific sentence absorbing most objections; that sentence is your cheapest possible edit.
- Cross-bloc alliances: watch for groups with opposed interests agreeing on procedure ('this was rushed') — procedural narratives are the hardest to counter.
- The fairness read on transition terms: whether the grace period placates incumbents or reads as favoritism to everyone else.