August Wartin asks:
Are you are familiar with any (economic) literature that attempts to model academia or the labor market for researchers (or similar), incorporating stuff like e.g. publication bias, researcher degrees of freedom, the garden of forking paths etcetera (and that perhaps also discusses possible proposals/mechanisms to mitigate these problems)? And perhaps you might know any empirical (economic) literature evaluating the effect of some policy measures to mitigate these problems?
I send this along to Paul Smaldino who wrote a paper, The Natural Selection of Bad Science, a few years ago, and who has more papers on the topics on his website. Smaldino added:
There are an increasing number of models of these processes. Here’s a recent paper I like that I think is a nice, simple model.
This article, by George Akerlof and Pascal Michaillat, seems similar to another paper by those authors that we discussed here a few years ago.
Now that there’s a whole subfield of meta-science studies where researchers construct and compute theoretical models of the scientific process, the next step is meta-meta-science, where we have models of the incentive and communication structure of meta-science. And then meta-meta-meta-science . . .
Also I’m interested in any answers to the question that Wartin asked in the last sentence of his above-quoted email.