The Dissemination of Scholarly Information: Old Approaches and New Possibilities

Current methods of disseminating scholarly information focus on the use of journals who retain exclusive rights in the material they publish. Using a simple model we explore the reasons for the development of the traditional journal model, why it is no longer efficient and how it could be improved upon. One of our main aims is to go beyond the basic question of distribution (access) to that of filtering, i.e. the process of matching information with the scholars who want it. With the volume of information production ever growing - and attention ever more scarce - filtering is becoming crucial and digital technology offers the possibility of radical innovation in this area. In particular, distribution and filtering can be separated allowing filtering to be made open and decentralized. This would promises to deliver dramatic increases in transparency and efficiency as well as greatly increased innovation in related product, processes and services

The Dozen Things Experimental Economists Should Do (More of)

What was once broadly viewed as an impossibility—learning from experimental data in economics—has now become commonplace. Governmental bodies, think tanks, and corporations around the world employ teams of experimental researchers to answer their most pressing questions. For their part, in the past two decades academics have begun to more actively partner with organizations to generate data via field experimentation. Although this revolution in evidence‐based approaches has served to deepen the economic science, recently a credibility crisis has caused even the most ardent experimental proponents to pause. This study takes a step back from the burgeoning experimental literature and introduces 12 actions that might help to alleviate this credibility crisis and raise experimental economics to an even higher level. In this way, we view our “12 action wish list” as discussion points to enrich the field

What Determines Trust? Human Capital vs. Social Institutions: Evidence from Manila and Moscow

It is now well established that highly developed countries tend to score well on measures of social capital and have higher levels of generalized trust. In turn, the willingness to trust has been shown to be correlated with various social and environmental factors (e.g. institutions, culture) on one hand, and accumulated human capital on the other. To what extent is an individual's trust driven by contemporaneous institutions and environmental conditions and to what extent is it determined by the individual's human capital? We collect data from students in Moscow and Manila and use the variation in their height and gender to instrument for measures of their human capital to identify the causal effect of the latter on trust. We find that human capital positively affects the propensity to trust, and its contribution appears larger than the combined effect of other omitted variables including, plausibly, social and environmental factors

The Dissemination of Scholarly Information: Old Approaches and New Possibilities

Current methods of disseminating scholarly information focus on the use of journals who retain exclusive rights in the material they publish. Using a simple model we explore the reasons for the development of the traditional journal model, why it is no longer efficient and how it could be improved upon. One of our main aims is to go beyond the basic question of distribution (access) to that of filtering, i.e. the process of matching information with the scholars who want it. With the volume of information production ever growing - and attention ever more scarce - filtering is becoming crucial and digital technology o ers the possibility of radical innovation in this area. In particular, distribution and filtering can be separated allowing filtering to be made open and decentralized. This would promises to deliver dramatic increases in transparency and effciency as well as greatly increased innovation in related product, processes and services.Journal, Open Access, Scholarly Communication, Matching

Carrots that look like sticks: toward an understanding of multitasking incentive schemes

Constructing compensation schemes for effort in multidimensional tasks is complex, particularly when some dimensions are not easily observable. When incentive schemes contractually reward workers for easily observed measures, such as quantity produced, the standard model predicts that unrewarded dimensions, such as quality, will be neglected. Yet, there remains mixed empirical evidence in favor of this standard principal-agent model prediction. This article reconciles the literature using both theory and empirical evidence. The theory outlines conditions under which principals can use a piece rate scheme to induce higher quantity and quality levels than analogous fixed wage schemes. Making use of a series of complementary laboratory and field experiments we show that this effect occurs because the agent is uncertain about the principal's monitoring ability and the principal's choice of a piece rate signals to the agent that she is efficient at monitoring