Research Working Papers

Methodology · design

Randomized controlled experiments

3 papers

WP29

Protocol-Guided Autonomous Research with Claude Code

Scientific Verification, Reproducibility, and the Cost of Delegation: A Controlled Study

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.0

Instruction files that steer coding agents through research tasks range from one sentence to several thousand words of phases, gates and integrity rules, but whether that structure changes what the agent delivers has not been measured with the agent held fixed. The paper reports 288 live Claude Code runs (362…

WP27

The Invisible Hand of Machines: Price Discovery in Markets Populated by LLM Agents

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.0

What happens to price discovery when a growing share of the traders in a market are autonomous language-model agents? The paper builds an event-sourced continuous double-auction exchange with exact accounting, a latent dividend process that separates fundamental value from public value and transaction price, seven…

WP26

Can Autonomous AI Agents Discover the Fundamental Value of Real Estate? Evidence from Quebec Transactions and Multi-Agent Deliberation

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.0

Committees of role-specialised language-model agents that debate before answering are increasingly proposed as valuation tools. This paper asks whether the debate adds information. In a preregistered experiment on 631,866 arm's-length residential sales registered in Quebec between 2021 and 2026, evaluated under a…