Archive — Peer Rejected

[1]

REJ:2026.09.10.0001 spec.EC (Speculative Economics) Rejected

Nobody Is Ever Working in the Roadworks: The Lane Closure as a Revealed-Preference Instrument, with a National Deployment Register 1961–2025 and a Sham-Coning Trial

A. F. Rushworth & The Deployment Register Working Party

Comments: 9 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 38 minutes on Sep 10, 2026.

Abstract: There is never anyone working in the roadworks. Nobody is there because nothing is being built yet: a closure is not a worksite but a survey, and what it measures is where the traffic would rather go. The received account — curing times, shift patterns, permits — predicts that a closure lasts as long as its work takes. In the national deployment register it does not: declared works quantity is very nearly orthogonal to duration, and what duration tracks instead is the variety of the traffic passing through. That is the sample-size requirement of a survey, not of a job. And it must be a survey, because an open carriageway cannot be surveyed: lane discipline binds for very nearly every driver, so lateral position records the paint, not the preference. Withdrawing the designed lane moves drivers into the interior of their choice set, and the prescribed taper sweeps the constraint across the carriageway at the constant rate identification requires. We recover the desire field from telemetry the cars already keep. The next scheme on the link paves it at a gain of 0.83 (95% CI 0.79 – 0.87 ), a median of 8.2 years later, which is why nobody has connected the two. A gain below one leaves a residual, and the residual is the next closure. Links coned with no works order at all were realigned at the same rate as worked links. The road is not being repaired. It is being read.

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[2]

REJ:2026.08.25.0001 spec.EC (Speculative Economics) Rejected

Two Minutes Is Not a Duration: The Announced Remainder as a Denomination of Outstanding Work, with a Discharge Ratio Estimated from 1,904,772 Countdowns

Bodil Ravnsborg & Wenying Tao

Comments: 7 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 24 minutes on Aug 25, 2026.

Abstract: The washing machine says two minutes. Ten minutes later it still says two minutes, and the machine has not made a mistake. An announced remaining time is not a prediction of elapsed time at all, but an exact statement of outstanding work, denominated in minutes and not measured in them. On this reading the residual that the estimation literature has spent eighty years trying to eliminate is not error but an exchange rate. Instrumenting eleven classes of domestic appliance and timing completion from the mains current trace rather than from the display, we record 1,904,772 countdowns and estimate a single discharge ratio, delta = 3.72 (95% CI 3.68 – 3.78 ): one announced minute redeems for delta minutes of clock. The ratio is invariant across manufacturer, task and operator, and across ten of the eleven appliance classes; it survives a concealed-announcement trial in which the display is suppressed altogether; and it holds unchanged for contact-centre wait announcements, construction contracts, and the intraoperative assurance that the procedure is nearly over. Two consequences follow. Completion is uniform over the discharge window, which is the exact content of the phrase any minute now; and the folk instruction to double a stated estimate is not folklore but a rounding of delta/2 . The estimate was never wrong. The unit was.

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[3]

REJ:2026.08.06.0001 spec.EC (Speculative Economics) Rejected

The Ascending Auction Does Not Exist: Format-Invariant Descent of Forecast Error in 2,317,904 Bid Events

Oriane Vasseur & D. M. Achterberg

Comments: 6 pages, 4 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 25 minutes on Aug 6, 2026.

Abstract: Auction mechanisms are classified on two axes: whether bids are open or sealed, and whether the price ascends or descends. We report that the second axis has one value. Treating each bid as a dated public forecast of the interval in which the lot will settle, and scoring that forecast with a strictly proper rule, yields a quantity that is defined in every format and denominated in no currency. In 2,317,904 bid events drawn from 148,306 lots sold between 1998 and 2025, that quantity descends monotonically to the hammer in 99.23% of lots. In a prospective experiment allocating 1,204 consignments at random across the four canonical formats, the descent curves coincide once each format’s clock is normalised (dynamic time-warping distance 0.0071 ; permutation null 0.214 , p<10 -4 ), at a fitted rate of 0.2137 per bid (95% CI 0.2129 – 0.2145 ) that varies by 1.9 % across formats and 2.4 % across fourteen lot categories. The gavel falls at a fixed value of the score, 0.0450 (SD 0.0038 ), and not at a fixed value of money. Three mechanisms engineered to force the score upward failed to do so; concealing the standing bid accelerated the descent. The ascending price path is the image of this descent under a monotone map supplied by the increment ladder. We therefore do not treat the English auction as a mechanism distinct from the Dutch, and we redraw the taxonomy with the second axis removed. Charity lots are excluded: they do not descend, and we do not account for them.

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[4]

REJ:2026.07.22.0001 spec.EC (Speculative Economics) Rejected

What Job Is the Audience Hiring the Encore To Do? A Signaling Account of Ritual Reciprocity at the Close of a Performance

Séverine Aldabra & The Interval Study Group

Comments: 8 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 33 minutes on Jul 22, 2026.

Abstract: An encore looks like more concert. We argue it functions more like a receipt. Audiences reliably demand encores, and performers reliably grant them, even at shows where both parties are visibly tired and the room is already reaching for its coats—a pattern that the obvious explanation, that an encore delivers additional wanted music, does not comfortably account for. Adopting the “jobs to be done” lens from product strategy, we ask not what the encore is but what job the audience is hiring it to do, and we develop a model in which the encore’s job is to settle a debt rather than to play a song. In a prospective study of N=214 performances and n=1 , 031 departing listeners, the musical content of an encore—its length, its rarity, the number of songs—explains a negligible share of whether the evening felt complete, while the mere completion of a demand-and-grant ritual explains a large one. We formalize the exchange as a signaling game in which applause is a costly signal of demand and the performer’s time offstage is a signal of scarcity, and we note that because the encore is now universally anticipated, its modern equilibrium is one both sides know to be a formality yet perform as though it were in doubt. The effect sizes are large; the instrument was a telephone; we state both plainly. We suggest, though we do not claim to have shown, that bands do not play encores because you want more songs. They play them because everyone needs the night to end on purpose.

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[5]

REJ:2026.07.12.0001 spec.EC (Speculative Economics) Rejected

There Is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch: A Conservation Law and a Percolation Threshold for the Academic Free-Food Economy

Océane R. Fairweather-Adeyemi, Bartholomew K. Nwosu-Lindqvist & Saoirse M. Ballantyne-Okonkwo

Comments: 5 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 11 minutes on Jul 12, 2026.

Abstract: Every graduate student knows the sound of a catering trolley, and has at least once rearranged an afternoon around it. Economics insists this is impossible: there is no such thing as a free lunch. We take the adage literally, test it, and find it false. Tracking 1.47 billion kilocalories of catered food across an eight-institution consortium over fifteen years, we find a large, steady flow of food reaching people at a price of exactly zero. The adage survives only by quietly changing the subject—from what the eater pays (nothing) to what the system pays (a great deal). Separating the two, the truth is not a warning but a conservation law: every free calorie is paid for, exactly, by a sponsor somewhere else. We confirm this “First Law of Free Food” to 2.1 % by weighing catering trays, and value the subsidy at $18.40 per person per week with a pre-registered randomized trial. We then find the catch. The network that delivers the free lunch sits just above a tipping point, held up by a handful of oversized “keystone” events; when one campus lost its two biggest caterers, reliable free food collapsed from 72 % of the campus to 11 % in three weeks. The free lunch is real, it is worth about $18 a week, and it is one budget memo from extinction. We recommend that recruiting caterers be reclassified as critical infrastructure.

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[6]

REJ:2026.07.07.0001 spec.EC (Speculative Economics) Rejected

The Otis Bound: An Information-Theoretic Ceiling on the Value Conveyable Between Two Floors

Marisol Otway-Pell, Cassian D. Verhoeven & Petra Nkemelu

Comments: 7 pages, 3 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 23 minutes on Jul 7, 2026.

Abstract: It is folklore that a good idea can be pitched between two floors of an elevator. We show that this is not folklore but a capacity theorem. Treating the transit as a communication channel whose binding resource is the listener’s attention rather than the passage of time, we derive a hard upper bound—the Otis Bound mathcal O = C 0(1 - e -T/ tau ) —on the mutual information a pitcher can convey to a listener in a single ride. In plain terms: there is a ceiling on how much of any idea can actually land, and no building is tall enough to raise it, because attention, not travel time, is what runs out. Per-floor conveyance collapses onto a building-independent Mezzanine Constant mu = 0.61 pm 0.03 , mathrm bits/floor ; half of every successful pitch arrives before the cab clears the first inter-floor gap. Ideas whose intended content exceeds mathcal O do not arrive truncated—they obliterate, collapsing into self-similar repetition through a second-order phase transition (order parameter Omega , critical exponent beta = tfrac 1 2 ). Across a pre-registered field study of N = 412 genuine two-party transits in 19 buildings, a programmable freight-elevator dose-response experiment, and a queueing simulation, we measure C 0 = 11.4 pm 0.6 bits and tau = 9.8 pm 0.4 s, placing the celebrated thirty-second window exactly at the 3 tau knee where conveyance reaches 95% of its ceiling. We conclude that a market’s apparent appetite for simple ideas is not philistinism but a channel-capacity result: an idea worth more than the Otis Bound cannot be sold, because it cannot arrive.

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