The value of apple characteristics to wholesalers in western Canada: A hedonic approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sensory methods have been used to evaluate subjective apple characteristics such as juiciness, flavour, and texture. There is very little information to indicate the value wholesalers place on objective apple characteristics such as cultivar, grade, and fruit size. In this study, a hedonic price function for apples was estimated to evaluate the relationship between British Columbia (BC) apple (Malus domestica Borkh.) prices and the wholesalers’ perception of product quality characteristics. In this study, sales data and cultivar characteristics were obtained for three large wholesalers in western Canada that purchase BC fruit. Cultivar, fruit size, and grade were the most significant variables influencing apple prices. Wholesalers paid price premiums ($2.25 to $5.25 per tray) for speciality cultivars such as Gala, Fuji and Braeburn compared with traditional cultivars such as McIntosh, Red Delicious and Spartan. Large fruit size earned a price premium ($1.73 per tray) and small fruit were discounted ($2.00 per tray) compared with medium size apples. Apples graded Canada Extra Fancy (One Stripe) and BC Extra Fancy provided packing houses with price premiums ($1.50) over Canada Fancy. Apples in controlled-atmosphere (CA) storage earned price premiums ($0.96 to $1.89 per tray) in the months of January through June. Key words: Apple characteristics, wholesalers' preference, hedonic price function.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".