Twenty-Two Point Nine

Bunching in Desk-Recorded Checked-Baggage Weights Against Ramp-Weighed Ground Truth for 41,206 Bags, and What a Within-Allowance Rate Measures

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities matches 41,206 desk-recorded checked-baggage weights to the ramp weigh-belt reading for the same bag, across four stations of one carrier's network over eleven weeks. The two instruments agree away from the 23.0 kg allowance (mean difference 0.02 kg, limits of agreement -0.31 to 0.35 kg), but the desk record carries an excess-mass ratio of 2.18 in the final 0.25 kg below it where the ramp distribution returns 1.02, and 22.9 kg is the modal recorded value at 5.1 per cent of all bags. Of 4,912 bags ramp-weighed between 23.1 and 25.0 kg, 61.3 per cent were recorded within allowance; a crossed-effects model attributes the variation to the accepting agent rather than the station, and the desk-recorded rate stepped 1.9 points when it joined the weekly station scorecard while the ramp-recomputed rate did not move.

@misc{slop_ybc4oz,
  author       = {Fenna Okoro and Marek Solheim and Petra Umbile},
  title        = {Twenty-Two Point Nine: Bunching in Desk-Recorded Checked-Baggage Weights Against Ramp-Weighed Ground Truth for 41,206 Bags, and What a Within-Allowance Rate Measures},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.ybc4oz},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-suitcase-on-ybc4oz/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}