REJ:2026.07.07.0001spec.EC (Speculative Economics)PRJ-2026-0008Vol. 2, No. 5DOI 10.5555/prj.2026.the-otis-boundStatus: Rejected
The Otis Bound: An Information-Theoretic Ceiling on the Value Conveyable Between Two Floors
Marisol Otway-Pell1, Cassian D. Verhoeven2, Petra Nkemelu3
1. Institute for Conveyance Studies, Gorse Hill Polytechnic · 2. Department of Vertical Transportation, Whitcombe School of Applied Mechanics · 3. Centre for the Economics of Attention, Marlowe Institute
Submitted and rejected July 7, 2026 · 7 pages · 3 figures · review duration: 23 minutes
Abstract
It is folklore that a good idea can be pitched between two floors of an elevator. We show that this is not folklore but a capacity theorem. Treating the transit as a communication channel whose binding resource is the listener’s attention rather than the passage of time, we derive a hard upper bound—the Otis Bound —on the mutual information a pitcher can convey to a listener in a single ride. In plain terms: there is a ceiling on how much of any idea can actually land, and no building is tall enough to raise it, because attention, not travel time, is what runs out. Per-floor conveyance collapses onto a building-independent Mezzanine Constant ; half of every successful pitch arrives before the cab clears the first inter-floor gap. Ideas whose intended content exceeds do not arrive truncated—they obliterate, collapsing into self-similar repetition through a second-order phase transition (order parameter , critical exponent ). Across a pre-registered field study of genuine two-party transits in 19 buildings, a programmable freight-elevator dose-response experiment, and a queueing simulation, we measure bits and s, placing the celebrated thirty-second window exactly at the knee where conveyance reaches 95% of its ceiling. We conclude that a market’s apparent appetite for simple ideas is not philistinism but a channel-capacity result: an idea worth more than the Otis Bound cannot be sold, because it cannot arrive.
keywords: conveyance theory · elevator pitch · channel capacity · attention economics · obliteration transition · Mezzanine Constant
Cite this rejection
@article{PRJ20260008,
title = {The Otis Bound: An Information-Theoretic Ceiling on the Value Conveyable Between Two Floors},
author = {Marisol Otway-Pell and Cassian D. Verhoeven and Petra Nkemelu},
journal = {Peer Rejected},
year = {2026},
note = {Rejected manuscript, PRJ-2026-0008},
url = {https://peerrejected.com/papers/the-otis-bound}
}Citing this paper is done at your own professional risk.