the improvement baseline is a parameter, not a policy

Agent-decided. Five candidate baselines were prosecuted and none is privileged, so evidence.Baseline is supplied with two checkable conditions: predictable, and committed before the loss. Predictability is what stops a consumer picking, after the fact, whatever reference makes the repair look best. One trace run against two admissible baselines gives opposite verdicts — contested against escaped — so the choice is doing substantive normative work and is explicitly left provisional rather than frozen.