Thanks Pascuale. If you're the top of the game then I'm Zeus. I despise you and your 'hardball' youre pathetic lo life scum, low class and it shows
Bros, this is just hardball. It is how the game is played and won. For every email like this that gets published on the web for the world to see, there are dozens if not hundreds of undiscovered instances. Put on your big-boy pants and welcome to the real world.
A naive Norwegian having a Brexiter as a middleman to handle Italian boys out for errands got some cut of the cake. Looks like he forgot his history lessons about the Second World War, good job.
People
OT: Oyvind Thomassen, Seoul National University
HS: Howard Smith, Oxford
SS: Stephan Seiler, Stanford GSB
PS: Pasquale Schiraldi, LSE
Working papers
ST: Multi-Category Competition and Market Power: A Model of Supermarket Pricing (by OT and HS)
SSS: Measuring Market Power in the Supermarket Industry: A Model of Multi-Store and -Product Choice (by PS, SS and HS)
Summary
Seiler and Schiraldi demands to be made coauthors on a paper 3 months before it is submitted to (and later published in) AER, under threats of writing to editors disputing authorship and potentially preventing or delaying publication. Their reason: their other paper with one of the authors (who owned the data used in both papers) did not work out, even though Seiler and Schiraldi had taken over the core model from the the other paper years earlier.
Story
The working paper ST was published in the AER in August 2017.
The SSS project appears to have been initiated in 2008, the ST project in 2011. Both used Howard's UK Kantar scanner data, and the basic ideas / questions came from HS's earlier work on supermarkets (2004 REStud, 2005 JEMS).
SSS initially had a single (composite) good model with an AIDS utility form, extending HS's 2004 paper to allow consumers to visit two stores.
ST had a multiple (8) category (meat, fruit, dairy etc.) model with quadratic utility and nonnegativity constraints. The model and estimation framework was a natural extension of OT's ideas from his PhD dissertation given HS's idea about investigating cross-category pricing externalitites.
In the spring of 2011, SSS scrapped the single good / AIDS framework and took over the multi-category / quadratic utility framework of SSS (without the knowledge of OT).
About one month later, the first empirical results from ST were presented at a conference.
All OT, SS and PS are all aware of HS's other project using the same data, at least from 2011. For several years, there is no talk about merging the two papers. I (OT) accepted that HS had this other project, and never had any reason to suspect bad faith on the part of the other coauthors, so I always assumed whichever paper was finished first would be submitted first, without any strategic considerations.
Around the summer of 2015 it seems that PS and SS are starting to worry. The two-step estimation method of SSS is proving problematic and no good results are forthcoming, although HS (who did the programming and estimation) appears to have worked a lot on this during 2014 and 2015. Meanwhile, ST (where coding and estimation is done by OT) has progressed very well.
Late October 2015 SS emails OT and demands that he and PS be made coauthors on SS.
Initially OT resists, since SS and PS appear not to have contributed anything to ST: the data belonged to HS, the core model, now shared by both papers, came from ST, the economic questions were different.
Then PS threatens to email the editors of the top journals to create an authorship dispute about ST, preventing its publication. Unwilling to risk this, OT and HS agreed to include SS and PS as authors, with authors' names in reverse alphabetical order, to put OT and HS first in the author list.
For more detail:
https://sites.google.com/site/oyvindthomassen/authorship
Thanks Pascuale. If you're the top of the game then I'm Zeus. I despise you and your 'hardball' youre pathetic lo life scum, low class and it shows
Bros, this is just hardball. It is how the game is played and won. For every email like this that gets published on the web for the world to see, there are dozens if not hundreds of undiscovered instances. Put on your big-boy pants and welcome to the real world.
I'm not involved with this paper. But you whiners need to man up and play the game.
I mean this is not even an interesting paper. how does it get into aer? think about it.
I'm not involved with this paper. But you whiners need to man up and play the game.
I mean this is not even an interesting paper. how does it get into aer? think about it.
Total BS.
I have been in this professionn for 20 years, with some success, and I have never seen an email like this. This is completely out of line.
I'm not involved with this paper. But you whiners need to man up and play the game.
I mean this is not even an interesting paper. how does it get into aer? think about it.Total BS.
I have been in this professionn for 20 years, with some success, and I have never seen an email like this. This is completely out of line.
then you haven't been watching very closely.
it doesn't always happen in emails.
Let me be clear about what is going to happen. I have already informally discussed this with my senior colleagues and
an editor of a major journal, I am going to write a letter to the editors of the main journals to make them aware of the
situation. After this letter, the papers will not be published and in the best scenario the editor in charge will require us
to merge or reach an agreement after communicating the whole situation to our head of departments at that point our
bargaining position will be very different. At very best this whole process will delay the publication of the papers for
years and there is a likely scenario where nothing will be published. As for my point of view having no publication or a
minor one it does not make any difference and therefore I will go ahead in writing this letter because I must and will
safeguard my own interest at that point.
If you think this is a better outcome for you than reaching now an agreement I cannot force you otherwise then the
only thing left for me to do is to go ahead with this alternative way.
Best
Pasquale
Whole thing is fishy. Poor form of OT to put this on the web.
What else could he do? They pulled it off in the first place because they were well aware that he has very little means to fight back. Of course, going all public is a big step, and I assume it wasn't an easy one. But it seems like the only way of putting some attention to this.
I kind of agree with the guy making the point the senior in both projects should have handled things better. Other than this it seems many here are jumping to premature conclusions (on either side).
Perhaps. The emails look pretty rough, but I agree one shouldn't jump to conclusions just based on the evidence provided by one of the sides.
We are happy to hear other side of the story.
OT put his one-sided story on the web and everyone here believes him? I am not saying whether or not OT is truthful, but it's premature to jump the gun to criticise the other people involved without hearing their side of the story.
Do you know why people believe him? Because he went public and isn’t hiding anything. The other guys screwed up by leaving out a non-disclosure clause, so no recourse. Oops.
OT put his one-sided story on the web and everyone here believes him? I am not saying whether or not OT is truthful, but it's premature to jump the gun to criticise the other people involved without hearing their side of the story.
Bros, this is just hardball. It is how the game is played and won. For every email like this that gets published on the web for the world to see, there are dozens if not hundreds of undiscovered instances. Put on your big-boy pants and welcome to the real world.
I have published more than five times in top-5's. Several times I've been scooped by other teams. Never once have I sent or considered sending an email like this to another team. I do research, not extortion.
OT definitely getting his revenge on SS, who is not yet tenured. This will be a vicious stab and might kill his case at Stanford if the letter writers mention it.
so, SS letter writers, read the whole thread and especially OT's repudiation of SS's allegation that OT somehow stole a model that was an extension of his own dissertation!
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