The Economist Stole My Idea!
Well, not really, but the similarities are uncanny…
From my September 26 post, Climate Change and The Winner’s Curse:
…the research on the rate and reach of climate change, even if it’s all done by good scientists using sound data-collection and analysis, is likely to result in findings that fall along a distribution. But while the truth of the matter is likely found in considering the distribution as a whole, the findings on the ends are going to be the ones that stick out to journal editors as the most interesting to prospective readers….
Let’s say there’s an auction of a good with an objective but unknown value (think fields for oil drilling, not a painting that each prospective buyer will value differently). Each buyer will estimate the value differently. Maybe they’ll each hire someone to professionally survey and appraise the good. The real value is probably around the mean estimate, but it’s the buyer with the high estimate who will buy the good, thinking the others suckers for passing on such a valuable purchase. But that buyer will almost certainly have over-valued the good. In an auction like this, you don’t want to be the winner.
Similarly, science journals are buying the articles that most highly estimate the costs of climate change — but they might be overpaying.
From an article in the current issue of The Economist, Publish and be wrong:
IN ECONOMIC theory the winner’s curse refers to the idea that someone who places the winning bid in an auction may have paid too much. Consider, for example, bids to develop an oil field. Most of the offers are likely to cluster around the true value of the resource, so the highest bidder probably paid too much.
The same thing may be happening in scientific publishing, according to a new analysis. With so many scientific papers chasing so few pages in the most prestigious journals, the winners could be the ones most likely to oversell themselves—to trumpet dramatic or important results that later turn out to be false. This would produce a distorted picture of scientific knowledge, with less dramatic (but more accurate) results either relegated to obscure journals or left unpublished.
More accurate, perhaps, than saying “The Economist Stole My idea!” would be to say “The Economist reported on scientific findings that support ideas I discussed!”
Tags: climate change, economics, science writing, the winner's curse