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