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 predicts that goods capped below market price withdraw from legal, recorded exchange, while goods capped at or above market trade on visibly. This conjecture reads Diocletian's Price Edict of 301 CE through that lens: the Edict's famous failure should be legible not as uniform disobedience but as selective documentary silence in the Egyptian papyri. Goods whose Edict ceiling sat well below attested Egyptian market prices of 285-300 CE should largely vanish from price documents after 301 — an attestation drop of half or more over the following two decades — while goods capped at or above market should barely move, falling a tenth at most, with the difference between the two groups sharply significant. The Edict thus becomes a natural experiment in shortage theory, its binding and non-binding ceilings sorting commodities into the silenced and the still-spoken-of. Attestation changes uncorrelated with the ceiling-to-market ratio kill it.
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.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture has been linked to the following subject pages on Inferpedia — an encyclopedia of the missing, now in limited preview.
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
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
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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