Related papers: Productivity Beliefs and Efficiency in Science
Science prizes purportedly reward innovation and explorations of new phenomena. Yet, in practice prizes may inadvertently divert resources from similarly impactful but less celebrated scholars. Despite this paradox, knowledge of how…
Scientific research requires taking risks, as the most cautious approaches are unlikely to lead to the most rapid progress. Yet much funded scientific research plays it safe and funding agencies bemoan the difficulty of attracting…
This article explains, and discusses the merits of, three approaches for analyzing the certainty with which statistical results can be extrapolated beyond the data gathered. Sometimes it may be possible to use more than one of these…
Reproducibility, the ability to recompute results, and replicability, the chances other experimenters will achieve a consistent result, are two foundational characteristics of successful scientific research. Consistent findings from…
This paper develops a theory of scientific and technological peer effects to study how individuals' productivity responds to the behavior and network positions of their collaborators across both scientific and inventive activities. Building…
Many experiments elicit subjects' prior and posterior beliefs about a random variable to assess how information affects one's own actions. However, beliefs are multi-dimensional objects, and experimenters often only elicit a single response…
We propose a new citation model which builds on the existing models that explicitly or implicitly include "direct" and "indirect" (learning about a cited paper's existence from references in another paper) citation mechanisms. Our model…
In recent years scholars have built maps of science by connecting the academic fields that cite each other, are cited together, or that cite a similar literature. But since scholars cannot always publish in the fields they cite, or that…
How much do individuals contribute to team output? I propose an econometric framework to quantify individual contributions when only the output of their teams is observed. The identification strategy relies on following individuals who work…
Accurate measurement of research productivity should take account of both the number of co-authors of every scientific work and of the different contributions of the individuals. For researchers in the life sciences, common practice is to…
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…
In an era of data abundance, statistical evidence is increasingly critical for business and policy decisions. Yet, organizations lack empirical tools to assess the value of evidence-based decision making (EBDM), optimize statistical…
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…
Emergent patterns of collective attention towards scientists and their research may function as a proxy for scientific impact which traditionally is assessed via committees that award prizes to scientists. Therefore it is crucial to…
The emergence of "big data" offers unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances but also enabling new modes of discovery. Scientific progress in many disciplines is increasingly enabled by our ability to examine…
It is widely assumed that increases in economic productivity necessarily lead to economic growth. In this paper, it is shown that this is not always the case. An idealized model of an economy is presented in which a new technology allows…
How should we evaluate the quality of generative models? Many existing metrics focus on a model's producibility, i.e. the quality and breadth of outputs it can generate. However, the actual value from using a generative model stems not just…
Overconfidence is a prevalent problem and particularly consequential in its relation with scientific knowledge: being unaware of one`s own ignorance can affect behaviours and threaten public policies and health. We introduce both analytical…
Despite persistent efforts to understand the dynamics of creativity of scientists over careers in terms of productivity, impact, and prize, little is known about the dynamics of scientists' disruptive efforts that affect individual academic…
Scientific and technological progress has historically been very beneficial to humanity but this does not always need to be true. Going forward, science may enable bad actors to cause genetically engineered pandemics that are more frequent…