Related papers: How competition propels scientific risk-taking
Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…
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…
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…
The role of skill (fitness) and luck (randomness) as driving forces on the dynamics of resource accumulation in a myriad of systems have long puzzled scientists. Fueled by undisputed inequalities that emerge from actual competitions, there…
Most modern systems strive to learn from interactions with users, and many engage in exploration: making potentially suboptimal choices for the sake of acquiring new information. We initiate a study of the interplay between exploration and…
The design of research grants has been hypothesized to be a useful tool for influencing researchers and their science. We test this by conducting two thought experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First,…
Participation incentives is a well-known issue inhibiting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in medicine, as well as a potential cause of user dissatisfaction for RCTs in online platforms. We frame this issue as a non-standard…
How do incentive levels affect strategic behaviour? We address this with an experiment that separately identifies own- and opponent-incentive effects in two dominance-solvable games that differ in strategic complexity. Higher own incentives…
Collaboration is a key driver of science and innovation. Mainly motivated by the need to leverage different capacities and expertise to solve a scientific problem, collaboration is also an excellent source of information about the future…
How does competition in markets for information affect the creation and division of surplus? We study this question in a search environment in which an agent searches sequentially for a high-quality good and learns about the quality of…
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…
Scientists are frequently faced with the important decision to start or terminate a creative partnership. This process can be influenced by strategic motivations, as early career researchers are pursuers, whereas senior researchers are…
We quantify the long term impact that the coauthorship with established top-cited scientists has on the career of junior researchers in four different scientific disciplines. Through matched pair analysis, we find that junior researchers…
In scientific research, collaboration is one of the most effective ways to take advantage of new ideas, skills, resources, and for performing interdisciplinary research. Although collaboration networks have been intensively studied, the…
Resource competition is a fundamental interaction in natural communities.However little is known about competition in spatial environments where organisms are able to regulate resource distributions. Here, we analyze the competition of two…
Participation in conferences is an important part of every scientific career. Conferences provide an opportunity for a fast dissemination of latest results, discussion and exchange of ideas, and broadening of scientists' collaboration…
After 2009 many governments implemented austerity measures, often restricting science funding. Did such restrictions further skew grant income towards elite scientists and universities? And did increased competition for funding undermine…
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…
The shift from individual effort to collaborative output has benefited science, with scientific work pursued collaboratively having increasingly led to more highly impactful research than that pursued individually. However, understanding of…
In the scientific community, prizes play a pivotal role in shaping research trajectories by conferring credibility and offering financial incentives to researchers. Yet, we know little about the relationship between academic collaborations…