Internal Controls, Routine Activity Theory (RAT), and Sustained Online Auction Deception: A Longitudinal Analysis
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper adapts and extends routine activity theory (RAT) to investigate the co-evolution of eBay's controls with mundane crime in the rapidly growing auction market of 1997–2005. A suspected deceptive seller's eight-year account history indicates the presence of the three market characteristics that RAT identifies as essential for deception: (1) a motivated offender, (2) suitable targets, and (3) an absence of capable guardians (i.e., regulation and eBay controls). The results document the co-evolution of a deceptive seller's tactics with eBay's controls. The investigation introduces (1) a new market, i.e., the early online auctions, (2) a new theory, i.e., RAT, and (3) new data, i.e., of a long-term deceptive seller, to the accounting controls literature. Contributions include tracing the evolving eBay control system, considering eBay's feedback system as an emergent form of continuous monitoring, and investigating the potential of RAT as an alternative theory for understanding control violations and informing accounting control analysis and design. Data Availability: The archival data are available from public sources. The primary data are available to scholars willing to sign agreements that protect the confidentiality of the sources.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it