For cell counts in a two-way contingency table, the independence model is
The absence of an interaction makes factor as a row effect times a column effect. Its maximum-likelihood fitted values are
Write and . Under the model in part (a),
and is independent of the price category . The Poisson-multinomial conditioning identity gives
More explicitly, the likelihood function for row factors as
The first factor is the likelihood of the row total and the second is the conditional multinomial likelihood. The free price effect makes the first factor maximal at , while maximizing the remaining factors gives
Consequently both fits have the same maximum-likelihood fitted value
Here every row total is , the column totals are , and , so every fitted row is
This factorization is the Poisson trick.