# Referee report 2 — WP37 (internal, skeptical: data provenance, integrity, reproducibility, citations)

Role: data and integrity referee. Checks whether every statement in the manuscript is traceable to an authorised, logged artefact and whether the integrity rules of the mandate were respected.

# Provenance and authorisation

Raw data: owner export (.backup through a read-only connection) of a database owned by the PI; SHA-256 recorded and re-verified at every ingestion (src/common.verify_snapshot). Production untouched (no write path exists in the pipeline). Pass.
robots.txt disallows /api/; the public API was hit exactly once (homepage cross-check), logged in reports/phase0_feasibility.md. Pass.
No credentials in logs: logs/phase0_api_credentials.txt shows only key length/prefix. .env is git-ignored. Pass.
External data: Statistics Canada WDS, public, raw JSON kept with timestamps. Pass.

# Integrity rules of the mandate

Rule	Check
No fabricated observations	all tables generated by code from the snapshot; `tests/test_outputs.py` ties counts to source
Listed ≠ paid prices; disappearance ≠ sale; tag ≠ discount	stated in §1, §3, §9; promotions "inferred" throughout
Do not assume history/stores/IDs/API	Phase 0 report documents each; stores: unavailable; IDs: UPC for 2 feeds only
54 banners ≠ 54 chains	retailers table: 61 feeds → 52 banners → 37 companies; channel split; same-company flag
Matched counted separately	attrition table: 13 088 matched of 124 579
Exploratory vs causal	Model C explicitly descriptive; lead placebo reported as failed
Preregistration before results	`research/preregistration.md` hashed; three amendments logged with rationale
Null results reported	H5 market-level null; H3 economically null; Model F naive beats ML on MAE
No production change	prospective design described, not implemented

# Reproducibility

Full pipeline re-run from the raw snapshot after the manuscript was written (logs/rerun/full_rerun.log); JSON summaries compared by hash before/after — see reports/reproducibility.md for the outcome.
Independent recomputation of the weekly modal price, H1 median gap, AR(1), banner effects (pairwise within-estimator), promotion share, volatility ratio and chained Jevons with a different code path (DuckDB SQL + statsmodels) — reports/audit_recompute.json.
Seeds fixed; LLM annotation stored so the pipeline is API-independent.

# Citations

75 references; 73 resolved through Crossref DOIs, 2 (Varian 1980, Feenstra 1994) documented as DOI-less with JSTOR stable URLs, 1 report (Competition Bureau 2023) with URL. Three references first resolved to SSRN preprints were re-resolved to the journal versions (Chevalier–Kashyap–Rossi 2003 AER; Hottman–Redding–Weinstein 2016 QJE) or marked as a working paper (Gourville–Koehler 2004). references.bib is generated from the verified CSV; no hand-typed entries. Pass.
Every claim in the literature section is linked to a verified key in literature/evidence_matrix.csv.

# Concerns

The LLM annotator and the reviewer share the same prompt context in effect (the operator read the pairs after seeing the LLM labels); independence is not established. The manuscript now says "PI adjudication pending".
Company attributions for affiliated banners (Richelieu, Marché Ami, Axep, Inter-Marché, Club Entrepôt, Rachelle-Béry) come from the Food-Ka registry text; they affect only the same-/cross-company split and are marked ownership_basis = registry. Should be verified against corporate sources before publication.
Three post-registration amendments were needed. Each is defensible and logged, but A-001 changes the basket sample materially (7 → 15–18 items); the preregistered version's result (7 items) is not reported in the paper — it should be mentioned in §8. (The decision log has it.)
The Autres category (19 % of active listings) is a residual bucket; category-level results exclude it implicitly where n < 50 but the index results include it.

# Recommendation

Provenance, integrity and citation gates pass. Reproducibility gate conditional on the re-run comparison in reports/reproducibility.md.

spb/wp37_uqo