Switch it: Canadian rail regulations, Ramsey pricing, and potential implications for U.S. rail policy
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
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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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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