Survivorship
The rule set that decides which source value wins for each field on the golden record.
Once entity resolution has grouped five source rows together as "the same customer," survivorship rules decide which specific value to put on each field of the resulting golden record.
The common rules — almost universal across MDM tools — are:
- Most recent: pick the value with the latest `updated_at`. Good default for contact info.
- Source priority: pick the highest-ranked source's value. Good for legal name (registry of incorporation > CRM > marketing tool).
- Most complete: pick the longest non-empty value. Good for names and addresses.
- Highest confidence: pick the value from the most-confident cluster member.
- Majority vote: most-common value wins, ties broken by recency.
Survivorship rules are configured per-field, not per-record. They're the part of MDM that gets edited as the customer learns more about their data over time.