Switch it: Canadian rail regulations, Ramsey pricing, and potential implications for U.S. rail policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Like the Surface Transportation Board (STB) in the United States, the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) is the regulatory body governing the rail sector within Canada. Due to possible policy relevance, we examine the CTA’s regulated zonal interswitching (broadly equivalent to reciprocal switching in the U.S.) rates from the perspective of Ramsey (second best) pricing. Interswitching in Canada is intended to promote inter-rail competition when two or more railroads are proximate to each other and the shipper. Using Canadian waybill data and associated pricing parameter estimates as input into a numerical simulation, we examine extant Canadian interswitching rates in comparison to Ramsey rates, assuming each zonal rate corresponds to a distinct level of shipper demand. We find that recent Canadian interswitching rates are not far off of comparable Ramsey prices. Regarding U.S. policy, our findings imply that Ramsey pricing principles could still be used to set reciprocal switching access rates that would be economically justifiable to both shipper and carrier.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".