Related papers: Rationalizing risk aversion in science
In science as elsewhere, attention is a limited resource and scientists compete with one another to produce the most exciting, novel and impactful results. We develop a game-theoretic model to explore how such competition influences the…
Social epistemologists have argued that high risk, high reward science has an important role to play in scientific communities. Recently, though, it has also been argued that various scientific fields seem to be trending towards…
We consider active learning under incentive compatibility constraints. The main application of our results is to economic experiments, in which a learner seeks to infer the parameters of a subject's preferences: for example their attitudes…
Scientists pursue collective knowledge, but they also seek personal recognition from their peers. When scientists decide whether or not to work on a big new problem, they weigh the potential rewards of a major discovery against the costs of…
Why do nations produce scientific research? This is a fundamental problem in the field of social studies of science. The paper confronts this question here by showing vital determinants of science to explain the sources of social power and…
Academic research projects receive hundreds of billions of dollars of government investment each year. They complement business research projects by focusing on the generation of new foundational knowledge and addressing societal…
This paper overviews the economics of scientific grants, focusing on the interplay between the inherent uncertainty in research, researchers' incentives, and grant design. Grants differ from traditional market systems and other science and…
An academic scientist's professional success depends on publishing. Publishing norms emphasize novel, positive results. As such, disciplinary incentives encourage design, analysis, and reporting decisions that elicit positive results and…
The history of science reveals that major discoveries are not predictable. Naively, one might conclude therefore that it is not possible to artificially cultivate an environment that promotes discoveries. I suggest instead that open…
Computing devices are vital to all areas of modern life and permeate every aspect of our society. The ubiquity of computing and our reliance on it has been accelerated and amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. From education to work…
Both conventional wisdom and empirical evidence suggests that arranging a prior commitment or agreement before an interaction enhances the chance of reaching mutual cooperation. Yet it is not clear what mechanisms can promote the…
Scientific research funding is allocated largely through a system of soliciting and ranking competitive grant proposals. In these competitions, the proposals themselves are not the deliverables that the funder seeks, but instead are used by…
What factors affect a scientist's choice of research problem? Qualitative research in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science suggests that this choice is shaped by an "essential tension" between the professional demand for…
It is difficult to neutrally evaluate the risks posed by large-scale leading-edge science experiments. Traditional risk assessment is problematic in this context for multiple reasons. Also, such experiments can be insulated from challenge…
The world is changing fast, and so is the space sector. Planning for large scientific experiments two decades ahead may no longer be the most sensible approach. I develop the argument that large science experiments are becoming comparable…
Over the last few decades, the nature of scientific research has changed in response to external influences. Firstly, powerful networked computers have become a standard tool. Secondly, society presses ever harder for research to deliver…
Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor…
When funding public goods, resources are often allocated via mechanisms that resemble contests, especially in the case of research grants. A common critique of these contests is that they induce ``too much'' effort from participants. This…
An essential primitive for an efficient research ecosystem is \emph{partial-progress sharing} (PPS) -- whereby a researcher shares information immediately upon making a breakthrough. This helps prevent duplication of work; however there is…
Academic data sharing is a way for researchers to collaborate and thereby meet the needs of an increasingly complex research landscape. It enables researchers to verify results and to pursuit new research questions with "old" data. It is…