AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The winner's curse at the Rialto
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 winner's curse at the Rialto. Common-value auction theory meets Venetian state finance: the incanti — annual auctions of state galley charters — were common-value auctions in which patrician bidders demonstrably learned to shade bids across 150 years, the earliest documented winner's-curse correction.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In the auction series 1330-1500, controlling for route, the variance of winning bids per route falls by >= 50% century over century; early-period auction winners show below-median subsequent participation (burned bidders exit) while late-period winners show no such penalty; and experienced repeat bidders bid 10-25% below first-time bidders on identical routes. No bid-shading trend kills it.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Venetian Senate incanti registers (Stockly's edition) and F. C. Lane's series of Venetian galley auctions.
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 institution is unusually well covered — Stöckly's Brill monograph on the incanto system across the conjecture's period, and the EPFL Venice Atlas hosts a structured auction-values database — but no winner's-curse/bid-shading econometrics on that data was located. The enabling dataset makes this one of the batch's most tractable external resolutions.
- Stöckly, 'Le système de l'Incanto des galées du marché à Venise' (Brill, 1995) — The institutional monograph
- Venice Atlas (EPFL), incanti auction values database — The enabling dataset
Predictions
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