Working paper library

The Economic Geography of Digital Retail Supply: Product Diversity, Regional Specialization, and the Hidden Structure of Quebec's Online Economy

Evidence from 390,108 product listings of 1,569 Quebec online stores across 17 administrative regions (Fabri-Ka snapshot, 1 November 2026)

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

Can product-level online catalogues reveal the spatial organisation, diversity and specialization of a regional retail economy beyond what business counts show? This paper studies one read-only snapshot (1 November 2026) of Fabri-Ka, an aggregator of the public catalogues of 1,569 Quebec-based online stores (390,108…

The Hidden Architecture of Grocery Prices: Promotions, Retail Competition, and the Cost of Living in Quebec

Evidence from 300,613 posted-price events across 54 Quebec grocery feeds, August–November 2026

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

Grocery prices are not a single inflation process. Using a read-only research copy of Food-Ka, a Quebec grocery price aggregator, the paper assembles an auditable panel of 124,579 listings from 54 active source feeds (26 retail companies, two channels: online storefronts and weekly circulars) observed every seven…

The Hidden Dynamics of Used-Car Markets: Price Discovery, Inventory Liquidity, and Strategic Dealer Behavior

Evidence from a Daily Panel of 273,265 Quebec Listings

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

The paper studies price discovery and liquidity in the Quebec used-car market with a daily panel of 273,265 dealer listings observed by the aggregator Auto-Ka between 12 August and 1 November 2026, with every asking-price change and listing disappearance recorded about seven times a day. Hedonic models with flexible…

The Social Compression Hypothesis

A Pre-Registered Test of Coordination Demand, Institutional Capacity, and Instability in Historical and Modern Societies, with a Formal Framework and Agent-Based Experiments

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

Institutions, standards, records and administrative hierarchies can be read as devices that lower the communication cost of coordinating many people: a form of compression. This paper states that reading formally, derives what it does and does not imply, and tests its empirical corollary, that a mismatch between a…

Beyond the Square-Root Barrier: Automated Discovery of Algebraic and Algorithmic Shortcuts in Bitcoin Cryptography

A hypothesis-driven, reproducible study of secp256k1, ECDSA, BIP340 Schnorr and SHA-256 with machine-checked identities and controlled negative results

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

Bitcoin's security rests on the elliptic-curve discrete-logarithm problem on secp256k1, on SHA-256, and on the ECDSA and BIP340 Schnorr signature schemes. The generic cost of the discrete logarithm, Θ(√n), is a theorem in the generic-group model; the curve's unusual structure, a special prime, j-invariant 0 and…

TITAN-MoE: Topology-Aware and Predictive Expert Orchestration for Distributed Mixture-of-Experts Inference on Apple Silicon

A Measured Systems Study on a Heterogeneous Mac Cluster

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · November 2026 · v0.1

Sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) language models touch only a few experts per token, so a model whose weights exceed a machine's memory can still be served if the right experts are in the right place at the right time. This preliminary working paper reports the design, implementation and measurement of TITAN-MoE, an…

Zero-Forcing Bounds for Generalized Petersen Graphs: Computational Discovery and Certified Proofs for P(n,5)

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

The zero forcing number Z(G) of a graph is the minimum size of a set of initially black vertices from which the colour-change rule (a black vertex with exactly one white neighbour forces that neighbour black) eventually colours the whole graph; it bounds the maximum nullity of the matrices described by G. For the…

PRISME: Intervention-Supervised Sparse Workspace Editing for Small Language Models

Design, controlled evaluation, and negative and positive evidence at the 100M-parameter scale

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

PRISME augments a frozen causal decoder with a read-only source bank, an ephemeral sixteen-slot latent workspace re-created at every position, a shared sparse editor that rewrites one or two slots per action, a value controller trained on counterfactual intervention gains measured by executing paired edit/no-edit…

Beyond Text: Cache Compression and Knowledge Transfer in Multi-Agent Systems

A Reproducible Study of Fidelity, Communication Cost, and Repeated Handoffs

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

Agents built on language models hand information to one another as text, summaries, structured evidence, shared-memory references or, when they share a checkpoint, attention state (the KV cache). This paper asks under which task, model, cache, network and reuse conditions each representation preserves task-relevant…

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…

Beyond One-Step Distributed Maximum Likelihood: Local Bias Cancellation, Global Synchronization, and the Price of Inexact Curvature

A joint order–round frontier, its sharpness in an exact model, and measured communication costs

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

Distributed maximum likelihood estimation trades statistical efficiency for communication. The paper studies a two-phase protocol in which each of K workers corrects the bias of its local maximum likelihood estimator by an r-th order split-sample extrapolation over nested sub-blocks, the coordinator averages the…

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…

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…

When AI Agents Become Economic Agents: An Agentic General Equilibrium Theory

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

Households and firms are beginning to delegate economic decisions to autonomous agents built on a few shared foundation models. This paper studies what this does in general equilibrium. A human's decision error is idiosyncratic and averages out; an AI agent's error is common to every principal that uses the same…

From Labor to Capital: Artificial General Intelligence, General Equilibrium, and Asset Valuation

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

Restrepo (2025) shows that once artificial general intelligence lets compute perform every task, output becomes linear in compute, wages converge to the value of the compute a worker saves, and the labor share goes to zero. This paper extends his task economy by treating compute as a reproducible, priced, depreciating…

Beyond Hedonic Models: Spatiotemporal, Hierarchical and Probabilistic Architectures for Residential Real Estate Price Forecasting

A pseudo-real-time evaluation on 632,000 Quebec transactions and 82 local market indices, 2021–2026

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.1

This paper asks whether new forecasting architectures improve residential price forecasts over strong conventional methods, and under which conditions. Using the audited Quebec land-registry sample of UQO Working Paper 22 (632,006 sales, 2021–2026) and its real-time quality-adjusted index vintages, it defines three…

SHARP-HPI: A Spatially Hierarchical, Adaptive and Robust Framework for Quality-Adjusted Housing Price Indices

Monthly municipal indices for Quebec from 770,000 registered sales, 2021–2026

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

This paper develops and evaluates SHARP-HPI, a framework for monthly quality-adjusted housing price indices at the municipal level in thin markets. Stage one is a robust pooled hedonic regression with fine-scale location fixed effects, smoothly time-varying quality prices and provincial month effects; stage two models…

The Global Evidence on Housing Price Determinants: A Meta-Analysis of Hedonic Pricing Models, 1970–2026

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

This paper synthesises the global hedonic housing literature from 1970 to 2026 with a reproducible pipeline: 103,011 records identified from Semantic Scholar, Crossref, arXiv and OpenAlex, 56,727 unique records screened by rules and by independent agents under a PRISMA-style protocol, 2,249 hedonic studies included at…

From Listing Images to Property Valuation: A Multimodal AI Framework for Automated Building Characterization and the Cost Approach

Evidence from Québec single-family listings matched to the assessment roll

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

The cost approach to value requires a specification of the improvements — materials, finish grade, condition, renovations — that assessment rolls do not record and that appraisers obtain by inspection. This paper asks whether that specification can be extracted from the photographs and text of a for-sale listing by…

The Endogenous Housing Liquidity Premium: Search Frictions, Seller Urgency, and Price Discovery

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

This paper studies how search frictions, heterogeneous seller urgency, financing frictions and bargaining jointly determine the liquidity discount, transaction prices, sale hazards and price dispersion in a local housing market. In a continuous-time matching model with free entry of buyers, sellers differ in a…