Worked-example setupScope and assumptions
- Harbor Grid is original fiction; the packet supplies consolidated reported revenue categories and parallel posted-price changes but no validated economic market shares or communications evidence.
- Firm count and concentration are screens whose interpretation depends on market boundary, metric, period, capacity, fringe supply, entry, and buyer power.
- Economic power, agreement, accounting result, and legal liability are separate claims.
- Period
- One fictional reporting period and adjacent pricing dates
- Units
- Qualitative evidence map; reported revenue categories are not accepted as market-share units
- Rounding
- Exact binary evidence flags
Harbor Grid's three largest companies report most revenue in a broad segment. All three later raise posted prices. A memo calls the segment “a concentrated oligopoly with proven collusion and market power.”
Audit the share base
Reported segment revenue can combine products, geographies, internal allocations, acquired periods, and recognition policies that do not match the economic question. Define the product, customers, geography, period, and metric. Then map company data to that boundary and reconcile omissions, imports, fringe suppliers, capacity, and non-revenue competition.
Concentration can remain informative after that work. It signals that strategic interdependence may matter. It does not identify the mechanism or legal result.
Build alternative explanations for parallel terms
The firms may have agreed. They may also respond independently to a common input shock, regulation, public demand information, capacity limits, a common tax, or one another's observable moves. Request dated cost records, internal analyses, communications, contracts, public announcements, customer switching, discounts, quality changes, quantities, capacity, entry, and buyer negotiations.
Triangulate power
Test substitution, demand response, shares, margins under an appropriate cost concept, entry and expansion, capacity, duration, buyer power, conduct, and direct evidence. Each source can corroborate or challenge the others.
The revised conclusion should say what the current record supports: a few-firm screen and parallel posted terms. Agreement, durable power, harm, efficiency, and legal liability remain hypotheses requiring specified evidence and current authority.
Verified calculation · economics foundations analysis
The curriculum loader recomputed this example before it entered the site build. Expand any structured input to inspect the stated facts.
- claim audits
- 1 field
Inspect data
{
"concentration_screen": {
"causal_design_supplied": 0,
"decision_authority_identified": 0,
"feasible_alternatives_compared": 0,
"model_assumptions_stated": 0,
"observation_supplied": 1,
"value_criterion_stated": 0
}
}Recomputed result
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| causal claim supported | 0 |
| descriptive claim supported | 1 |
| model implication supported | 0 |
| recommendation supported | 0 |
| unsupported causal jump | 1 |