Statement has disappeared.
Pasquale probably threatened him.
Smith issues statement about Seiler and Schiraldi affair
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Remarks on the authorship of the paper Multi-Category Competition and Market Power: A Model of
Supermarket Pricing
The economic question that forms the basis for this paper was set out in my 2005 paper in JEMS with
Donald Hay, on what we there called agglomeration effects. Consumers buy multiple goods categories
and multi-stop shopping is costly. Therefore, co-located sellers of different categories have an
incentive to internalize cross-category pricing effects, which is presumably central to the growth of
the supermarket form of market organization in the twentieth century, and it is particularly interesting
because of its pro-competitive effect (i.e. reducing market power).
In March 2010 I met with Oyvind Thomassen whose PhD thesis I had supervised at Oxford, to discuss
my idea for a project with the aim of empirically estimating the effect on market power in grocery
retailing of internalizing cross-category effects, using UK household scanner data that I had obtained.
The main challenges of how to model this were (i) that consumers do not always buy all categories, so
the model would have to allow for zero demands, and (ii) that a consumer's demand function for a
given category, conditional on store choice, depends on unobservables that also affect store choice,
causing a selection issue. We decided to let consumers have a quadratic utility (with random shocks
and firm-category effects) from the quantity of each category (which would allow for zero demands),
and to estimate the model with moment conditions involving the unconditional demand functions (a
very important strength of the paper). This solution fell into place soon after we started work on the
project, as we had both worked on similar modelling issues before.
During the next year we made good progress, and in May 2011 I presented the paper, with estimates,
for the first time. The research question, data and fundamental model have remained unchanged, and
are the same as in the published version of the paper. Oyvind and I cooperated closely on all aspects
of the paper. He did the coding and estimation and I did the writing and data work, but we spoke at
least once per week during most of the time we worked on the paper, and discussed every step taken,
in minute detail.
Another question that I was interested in, as touched on in my 2006 RAND paper, is how far from
optimal the current market structure is (conditional on the existing stores) and how potential new
stores might add or detract from welfare. In a project with Pasquale Schiraldi and Stephan Seiler,
initiated in 2008, we estimated (also with my UK scanner data) a model extending my 2004 REStud
paper to allow consumers to visit one or two stores (instead of only one). We wanted to use the model
to evaluate the consumer surplus and profits that would derive from stores that the planner rejected.
There has been a policy discussion about introducing a "competition test" for the planner's decisions,
which would allow planners to stop applications that add to an already dominant incumbent's store
portfolio in a local area. The model would be used to evaluate the benefits (or costs) of imposing such
a rule retrospectively, in terms of utility.
In April 2011 Pasquale suggested extending our model to include multiple categories of goods, after
having been encouraged to do so at a seminar presentation. I told him that this was exactly what I was
doing in my work with Oyvind. At this point, I shared with Pasquale the latest write-up of my paper
with Oyvind, with the multi-category quadratic framework. Although I resisted the idea at first, we
agreed to adopt this framework in our planner paper (although with fewer categories). I was very
interested in the question of both papers...See full post -
I don't quite understand the logic of both HS and OT publishing these notes, then "removing" them (but leaving them easily accessible to anyone who has seen this thread).
Think about it. He's getting the information exactly to the people he wants it go to, and no others.
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Broette here. I have to admit I always had something going for bad boys who know what they want.
Bombing multiple threads with this crap. You mean the prole-bald kind of way? You do like a d!CK, that I agree
All substance aside, I think this Schiraldi guy is good looking in a masculine kind of way.
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I don't quite understand the logic of both HS and OT publishing these notes, then "removing" them (but leaving them easily accessible to anyone who has seen this thread).
Think about it. He's getting the information exactly to the people he wants it go to, and no others.
In fact, they are using EJMR to tell a story that needs to be told. Keep this in mind next time someone says EJMR is not a legitimate source of information.
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Nothing since the SS statement where he does not deny the bullying story but frames himself as someone who did not know.
Fun stuff today in the main topic: PS has another working paper merged with a guy from Korea. Same imbalance of bargaining power between the two groups.
Has there been *any* official reaction to this affair? Haven’t followed the story lately
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Nothing since the SS statement where he does not deny the bullying story but frames himself as someone who did not know.
It's even worse. SS frames himself as an innocent scholar who was unfairly taken advantage of by the scheming and untrustworthy HS. Because the "truth" according to SS is that HS agreed to merge the papers years ago and then never did:
At the time HS sees the projects as being sufficiently similar that he shared PS's view to merge the projects in order achieve an equitable outcome (see the statement by HS).
But if we see the statement by HS, HS gives a very different version of the truth:
I was very interested in the question of both papers, and strongly believed---as I still do---that there were more than sufficient differences between them to make them into two good papers, so that even with the common utility framework, the two projects would stand firmly as separate papers.
So Stephan Seiler is just a lying scumbag.
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PS and SS look very bad in this. But we shouldn't forget that Smith has a very large share of the blame. He started two projects with disjoint groups of authors and never explained to each of these groups that there was a conflict. He handled it terribly from the beginning until the end.