Refutation in Research: How to Improve Publication quality

Olga Bernard
Additional contact information
Olga Bernard: TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - UT - Université de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: I examine how incentives for refutation affect publication quality. I build a sequential model of public experimentation with two scientists, a researcher and a refuter. The researcher chooses when to publish a result confirming a hypothesis, with a probability that the result has type I error. The publication quality corresponds to the probability that the hypothesis is valid, which is the complement of the probability of type I error. Once the result is published, the refuter starts experimenting but, unlike the researcher, he can choose between working on refutation or on an outside safe option at any time. When scientists are initially pessimistic about the hypothesis' confirmation and when refutation is costly for the researcher, the higher the refutation rewards, the lower the equilibrium publication quality in case the researcher is more efficient than the refuter. The opposite result holds when the refuter is more efficient. In an extension, when the researcher's experimentation is private, I prove that the publication quality is lower than in the public experimentation case, suggesting that transparency improves research quality

Keywords: False Positives; Refutation; Experimentation; Publication Quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Annals of Economics and Statistics, 2020, 138, pp.21-48. ⟨10.15609/annaeconstat2009.138.0021⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02894636

DOI: 10.15609/annaeconstat2009.138.0021

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().