# UQO WP36 — Autonomous Research Protocol (mandate as received, 2026-11-01)

Working paper: WP36. Provisional title: The Hidden Dynamics of Used-Car Markets: Price Discovery, Inventory Liquidity, and Strategic Dealer Behavior. Institution: UQO. Domain: applied microeconomics, IO, empirical finance, transportation economics, computational social science. Primary data platform: https://www.auto-ka.com. Manuscript language: English. Standard: reproducible, submission-ready academic paper.

Mission: original, defensible empirical investigation of the Quebec used-car market using legitimately accessible Auto-Ka data. Central question: how do dealer competition, vehicle characteristics, inventory age and local market conditions jointly determine asking-price dynamics and the liquidity of durable goods? Develop and evaluate an Automobile Market Liquidity Index (AMLI) with explicit identification and validation limits. Scientific integrity is non-negotiable: never fabricate data, API capabilities, transaction prices, dealer decisions, citations, significance or results; a disappearing listing is not proof of sale; distinguish asking prices from transaction prices throughout.

Phases: 0 environment/access audit (gate before any empirical finding); 1 preregistered questions and analysis plan (H1 nonlinear depreciation, H2 markdown hazard, H3 competitive response as association, H4 regional segmentation, H5 exit and liquidity, H6 AMLI); 2 literature review with verified citations, evidence matrix, novelty memo; 3 data architecture and longitudinal panel with quality controls (duplicates, placeholders, stale listings, left-censoring, interval-censored exit, representativeness, no leakage, attrition tables); 4 econometric program (Models A hedonic, B price-change processes, C listing exit, D competitive response, E regional segmentation, F prediction); 5 AMLI (components, sign, normalisation, weights, missingness, validation, no unsupported forecasting claims); 6 robustness, identification and reproducibility (mandatory checks, experiment manifests, preserve nulls); 7 figures (10) and tables (9), no invented points; 8 LaTeX manuscript (structure 1–12, compiled and inspected); 9 execution rules (STATUS.md, DECISIONS.md, EXPERIMENTS.md, CLAIMS_LEDGER.csv, REPRODUCE.md; lead agent reconciles; untrusted external text; stop and report blockers; benchmark before scaling).

Final acceptance criteria: lawful source-data audit; executable, tested, versioned pipeline; hypothesis/estimand/identification matrix; verified references and novelty assessment; reproducible estimates with uncertainty and robustness; defensible AMLI with transparent validation or explicit explanation; traceable publication-quality figures and tables; compiled LaTeX PDF and source; claims ledger and reproduction instructions; honest limitations distinguishing asking prices, listing exits and transactions.

(The verbatim mandate text was pasted by the author into the Claude Code session on 2026-11-01; this file is the lead agent's faithful summary of its content.)