Given the above discussion of econometric testing, it is worth remarking that a trader using spreading would have been exploiting and thus reducing precisely the discrepancies in options prices that were the focus of the most sophisticated econometric testing of the Black-Scholes-Merton model in this period. (As has been noted, this testing was conducted by the financial economist Mark Rubinstein.) It therefore seems plausible that the use of the model in spreading did more than add generally to its verisimilitude; spreading may have had a direct effect on specific features of price patterns examined in the model's econometric tests.

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 146