Preregistered research

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

Does the Sales Comparison Approach Actually Work? A Large-Scale Point-in-Time Validation of Comparable Selection, Price Adjustments, and Value Reconciliation

Evidence from 391,000 Single-Family Transactions in Quebec, 2021–2026

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

The sales comparison approach is the dominant method of residential valuation, yet its operating rules — how many comparables to use, how far and how far back to search, which adjustments to apply, how to weight and reconcile — rest largely on professional convention. This paper subjects these rules to a…