# Proof corrections: systems-4550930

Dear Dr. Wang,

Thank you for preparing the proofs. The production comments have been addressed as detailed below. Author text corrections are marked in blue; revised Figures 1, 2, 6 and 7 and an updated standalone Supplementary Materials file are included. Production style and formatting changes have been retained, except for small table-width adjustments needed to prevent text overflow.

## P01 — original proof source line 61

Production comment: The title highlighted is different from the ones submitted online at susy.mdpi.com. Please confirm which are correct. / EE: Attention AE: Author adjusted

Response: Confirmed. The correct title is 'Competition Pressure, Work Hours and Welfare Valuation in a China-Calibrated Agent-Based Macroeconomic Model'. Please also update the title in SuSy to match the final manuscript.

## P02 — original proof source line 69

Production comment: Please carefully check the accuracy of names and affiliations.

Response: Confirmed by the author: Wei Wu and Jingjing Jiang; Jingjing Jiang is the corresponding author. No ORCID is being added at this stage.

## P03 — original proof source line 73

Production comment: Please arrange the authors’ address information from subordinate to superior. And please check if address information is right.

Response: Confirmed. The affiliation is ordered from department to school to university: Department of Management Science and Engineering, School of Economics and Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China.

## P04 — original proof source line 75

Production comment: Please add the postal code (or ZIP code in the U.S.). If a postal code is not available, a Post Office Box number can be added instead.

Response: The author-confirmed postal code, 518055, has been added after Shenzhen.

## P05 — original proof source line 147

Production comment: Please confirm if the italics are necessary; if not, please remove them. The following highlights are the same.

Response: Discretionary italics have been removed from the highlighted ordinary prose, including 'system', the research question and 'non-market time'. Mathematical notation and bibliographic title formatting are retained.

## P06 — original proof source line 285

Production comment: Please check meaning retained

Response: The intended wording is 'employment norms and identity', as in the accepted revision. We have restored this wording and its adjacent Hetschko et al. (2014) citation. The reference list has been restored to first-citation order.

## P07 — original proof source line 406

Production comment: Please revise citation of Appendix X through main text after revise Supplementary Materials format. Same as below highlights document its source

Response: The separate supporting document is now organised as Supplementary Sections S1-S10. All former Online Appendix references in the article have been updated. We also restored the words 'document its source', which had inadvertently become part of the production comment rather than the visible sentence.

## P08 — original proof source line 457

Production comment: Please confirm whether the overlapping content in this figure affects scientific understanding and if it does, please revise it.

Response: Figure 1 has been redrawn from its vector source to separate overlapping labels, transaction indexes and the bottom legend. Node and flow identities, arrow endpoints, directions and styles are unchanged.

## P09 — original proof source line 477

Production comment: Please ensure all variables/values in the equation appear in the same format in the text (normal/italic/bold/subscript/superscript).

Response: Checked. Mathematical variables retain consistent italic, roman, subscript and superscript forms between the equations and surrounding text. The displayed equations have been checked against the accepted revision.

## P10 — original proof source line 486

Production comment: We added indention of the paragraph, please check and confirm. Same as below highlights.

Response: Confirmed. The production team's paragraph indentation has been retained, including the highlighted paragraphs following displayed equations.

## P11 — original proof source line 832

Production comment: Please check if special format should be retained.

Response: Please retain typewriter formatting for employ, qg1 and qg6: these are exact CFPS variable identifiers, not ordinary prose or mathematical variables.

## P12 — original proof source line 877

Production comment: Please cite this table in the text and ensure that the first citation of each table appears in numerical order.

Response: An explicit reference to Table 1 has been added in the baseline-validation paragraph, before the table. First mentions of all article tables are now in numerical order.

## P13 — original proof source line 924

Production comment: 1. Please change the hyphen (-) into a minus sign (−, “U+2212”) in the figure, e.g., “-1” should be “−1”.  2. Please cite this figure in the text and ensure that the first citation of each figure appears in numerical order.

Response: Both requests have been addressed: negative axis labels in Figure 2 now use the mathematical minus sign (U+2212), and an explicit reference to Figure 2 has been added in the baseline-validation paragraph. Figure first mentions are in numerical order.

## P14 — original proof source line 934

Production comment: Please cite this table in the text and ensure that the first citation of each table appears in numerical order.

Response: An explicit reference to Table 2 has been added to the temporal-validation paragraph.

## P15 — original proof source line 980

Production comment: Please cite this figure in the text and ensure that the first citation of each figure appears in numerical order.

Response: An explicit reference to Figure 3 has been added to the temporal-validation paragraph.

## P16 — original proof source line 988

Production comment: Please cite this table in the text and ensure that the first citation of each table appears in numerical order.

Response: An explicit reference to Table 3 has been added where the input classification is introduced.

## P17 — original proof source line 1052

Production comment: Please confirm if the bold formatting is necessary; if not, please remove it. The following highlights are the same.

Response: The bold run-in heading 'Reduced-form proxy for theta_G' is retained because it identifies a separate diagnostic paragraph within Section 4.3. It is a heading, rather than emphasis on a result.

## P18 — original proof source line 1137

Production comment: Wrong Table citations order, first citation should be Table 1, please check and revise..

Response: The missing earlier references to Tables 1-3 have been inserted. The first mentions of Tables 1-10 are now in ascending order; the existing reference to the main experiment table is retained. Table 5 also now has an explicit narrative reference, in addition to the table note.

## P19 — original proof source line 1163

Production comment: We removed empty row, please confirm.

Response: Confirmed. The removal of the empty row is accepted. All nine scenario-by-ablation data rows and their values are unchanged.

## P20 — original proof source line 1323

Production comment: Please cite this figure in the text and ensure that the first citation of each figure appears in numerical order.

Response: An explicit reference to Figure 4 has been added to the paragraph discussing the exploratory unemployment-weight sweep.

## P21 — original proof source line 1349

Production comment: Please confirm if the alignment should be retained.

Response: Confirmed. The production team's alignment is retained; the claim column is left aligned and the numerical/status columns remain in their existing arrangement.

## P22 — original proof source line 1400

Production comment: We revised ``e-3'' to correct format, please check and confirm.

Response: The scientific notation has been checked against the accepted manuscript, result macros and the other occurrences in the proof. The correct maximum residual is 9.31 x 10^(-10), not 9.31 x 10^(-3). We have restored the exponent -10; the acceptance threshold remains 10^(-3). No simulation result has been changed.

## P23 — original proof source line 1453

Production comment: Please cite this figure in the text and ensure that the first citation of each figure appears in numerical order.

Response: An explicit reference to Figure 5 has been added in the paragraph introducing the friction comparison.

## P24 — original proof source line 1455

Production comment: Please check meaning retained

Response: The intended comparison is the full-minus-no-pressure contrast within the competition scenario. We have corrected the hyphenation to 'full-minus-no-pressure contrast', preserving its meaning.

## P25 — original proof source line 1499

Production comment: Please change the hyphen (-) into a minus sign (−, “U+2212”) in the figure, e.g., “-1” should be “−1”.

Response: The signed-grid figure now uses U+2212 for negative numerical labels, including coefficients and negative cell contrasts. The plotted parameter pairs and numerical values are unchanged.

## P26 — original proof source line 1557

Production comment: Please note that each subfigure should be described separately in the caption., e.g., (a) xxx; (b) xxx.

Response: The Figure 7 caption now separately describes all panels: (a) mean weekly hours; (b) unemployment rate; (c) real GDP; (d) expected demand; (e) total effective labour; (f) approved credit. The existing interval, timing and interpretation qualifications are retained.

## P27 — original proof source line 1564

Production comment: Please change spelling to "labour" (e)

Response: The spelling in panel (e) of Figure 7 has been changed from 'labor' to 'labour'. The plotted data and other figure content are unchanged.

## P28 — original proof source line 1611

Production comment: Please cite this table in the text and ensure that the first citation of each table appears in numerical order.

Response: An explicit reference to Table 10 has been added before the table, where the mechanism settings and four-cell comparison are introduced.

## P29 — original proof source line 1803

Production comment: Please list the completed captions/legends of the Supplementary Materials here.

Response: The Supplementary Materials statement now lists the complete captions of all 25 supplementary tables and six supplementary figures. The standalone supplement contains Supplementary Sections S1-S10.

## P30 — original proof source line 1804

Production comment: Please check information in supplementary materials, if it is Appendix, it should be moved to main tex and Figures, tables, and equations in the Appendix should be marked as “Figure A1, Table A1, Equation (A1)”, etc.t. if not, please check if it need to revise to other format. All Tables in appendix or supplementary files must be cited in the main text by order.

Response: These materials are intended as a standalone Supplementary Materials file, rather than article appendices. We have therefore replaced Appendix A-J with Supplementary Sections S1-S10, standardised all tables as S1-S25 and figures as S1-S6, and updated the article's references. The formerly unnumbered sample summary and manually labelled TFM/BSM tables are included in this continuous S-series. All supporting tables and figures are introduced in ascending order in the main text and listed with full captions in the back matter. Scientific values and equations are unchanged.

## P31 — original proof source line 1855

Production comment: Please check if special format of text should be retained.

Response: Please retain typewriter formatting for .dta, which identifies the Stata data-file extension.

## P32 — original proof source line 1909

Production comment: We added the country information of the publisher. Please confirm. Same as below highlights.

Response: Confirmed against publisher sources. The country fields are retained for Godley and Lavoie (Basingstoke, UK), Jahoda (Cambridge, UK), Pissarides (Cambridge, MA, USA), and Saltelli et al. (Chichester, UK).

## P33 — original proof source line 2152

Production comment: Please check if page information is right.

Response: The page information 23-46, 122 is correct for Zhu, Liu and Ren (2023). Page 122 contains the article's English abstract; it is not part of a continuous 23-122 range. The discontinuous page list has been retained.

## P34 — original proof source line 2159

Production comment: We are sorry but we could not find the required information about this entry. Please add the volume  number or doi information.

Response: The Chinese-language original appeared in Zhongguo Shehui Kexue, 2025, No. 5, pp. 72-91. We have added the verified issue number and official article URL: https://www.cssn.cn/dkzgxp/202506/t20250625_5883362.shtml. We could not verify a DOI or volume identifier from the official sources consulted, so neither has been invented.

## Additional corrections found during proofreading

1. The P90 column heading in Table 8 was inadvertently displayed as 'B' in the production proof. It has been restored to P90; all data cells are unchanged.
2. The independent replication verification entry in Supplementary Section S10.4 is now explicitly identified as scripts/verify_final_reproducibility.py, consistent with the already supplied replication README. This verifies archived aggregates without requiring licensed CFPS records or launching new simulations.
3. The funding declaration remains 'This research received no external funding', as confirmed by the author.

Best regards,
Wei Wu
