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 predicts the winner's curse — the highest bidder is the one who most overestimated the shared value — and that experienced bidders learn to shade their bids downward. This conjecture finds the earliest documented correction in Venetian state finance: the incanti, the Senate's annual auctions of state galley charters, were common-value auctions in which patrician bidders competed for routes of uncertain but shared profitability, and across 150 years they demonstrably learned. Controlling for route over 1330-1500, learning should be visible three ways: the variance of winning bids per route falling by half or more century over century as bidders converge on shading; early-period winners exiting — burned bidders showing below-median subsequent participation — while late-period winners suffer no such penalty; and experienced repeat bidders bidding 10-25% below first-time bidders on identical routes. No bid-shading trend kills it.
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.
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 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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