AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The Edict's missing markets
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
The Edict's missing markets. Price-ceiling economics meets Roman epigraphy: Diocletian's Price Edict of 301 CE worked exactly as shortage theory predicts — goods capped below prevailing market prices withdrew from recorded exchange, while goods capped at or above market stayed visible, so the Edict's failure is legible as selective documentary silence.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Classifying Edict commodities by the ratio of Edict ceiling to attested Egyptian market prices of 285-300 CE, goods with ratio < 0.7 show a >= 50% fall in attestation frequency in Egyptian price documents of 301-320 relative to 281-300, while goods with ratio >= 1.0 fall <= 10%; the difference-in-differences is significant at p < 0.01. Attestation changes uncorrelated with the ratio kill it.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Lauffer/Crawford editions of the Price Edict joined to the Rathbone-von Reden corpus of Egyptian price attestations.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo/web/DB access); titles-only knowledge of existing items, embedded in titles_supplied per the batch-2 lane rule; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH3_20260705.md (b043140). Novelty unverified by construction. titles_supplied stripped to the committed sidecar conjecture_fresh_fablemax_batch3_titles_supplied_20260705.md at import (schema additionalProperties:false; relaxation queued).
Novelty / leakage triage
Adjacent (closely related prior work exists)
The Edict is a textbook price-ceiling case with direct documentary anecdotes of divergence (the 335 CE wheat papyrus at 63x the cap) and quantitative-history uses of its schedule; the systematic silence-as-evidence test (commodity-level attestation frequency vs ceiling-to-market ratio, difference-in-differences) was not located.
- 'How Prosperous were the Romans? Evidence from Diocletian's Price Edict' — The Edict as quantitative dataset
Predictions
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