Informal pricing in formal fish markets: evidence from the Solomon Islands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How are fish prices determined in the largest formal market in the Solomon Islands? The Honiara Central Market is the country’s primary fresh produce market, serving as an important conduit between rural food producers and urban consumers. One distinctive characteristic of this market is that despite a diverse range of reef fish species being available, all reef fish are traded nominally as homogeneous goods with no price differentiation. Using transaction-level data collected from the market, we show the prevalence of informal pricing, wherein the unit price of fish is implicitly differentiated based on fish species groups, quality, and buyers’ attributes. This result aligns with our expectation that diverse species groups and qualities are traded in a competitive environment with many vendors and buyers, where reef fish are indeed traded as heterogeneous products. Although fish provide a vital source of food and income for Pacific Island countries, the pricing of this vital natural resource is poorly understood. Our study provides new insights into how fish prices are determined in a formal market within the context of small island developing states.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".