Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the extensive body of literature that aims to explain the phenomenon of consumer scams, the structure of information in scam relationships remains relatively understudied. The purpose of this article is to develop an agency-theoretic approach to the study of information in perpetrator–victim interactions. Drawing a distinction between failures of observation and failures of judgment in the pre-contract phase, we introduce a typology and a set of propositions that explain the severity of adverse selection problems in three classes of scam relationships. Our analysis provides a novel, systematic explanation of the structure of information that facilitates scam victimization, while also enabling critical scrutiny of a core assumption in agency theory regarding contract design. We highlight the role of scam perpetrators as agents who have access to private information and exercise considerable control over the terms and design of scam relationships. Focusing on the consumer scam context, we question a theoretical assumption, largely taken for granted in the agency literature, that contact design is necessarily in the purview of the uninformed principal.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".