Re: fantastically entertaining paper
I like Bryan's coordination failure idea --- we have a sort of peacock feathers problem. This is born out, I believe, in the evidence on how much the average article in the AER is read. The idea that the AER is the best journal as Bryan said a coordination issue. This is why I like one version of the Tullock solution --- eliminate the journals per se and have a central posting service and then judge articles on how much they are downloaded. I bet this would improve the information conveyed in abstracts and also change the incentive for people writing a few lousy papers since everything will be reputation based, etc. Sure there will be problems with this, but think about the potential benefits and then we can weight them against the potential costs and see if that system would on net a viable alternative to the current situation. Peter J. Boettke, Deputy Director James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy Department of Economics, MSN 3G4 George Mason University Fairfax, VA 22030 PHONE: 703-993-1149 FAX: 703-993-1133 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] HOMEPAGE: http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/pboettke - Original Message - From: Bryan D Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 20, 2002 11:29 PM Subject: Re: fantastically entertaining paper Robin Hanson wrote: Here we have an industry (academic journals) where concentration is low, entry is cheap, and most firms use the same production technology (referees with veto power), even though an alternate technology (editors pick) has long been tried, and is easy to try. Frey claims that it is a market failure not to use this alternate tech, because the standard tech has agency costs, which has the effect of raising the costs to one of the inputs (authors). I must have raised this issue before, but aren't you leaving out a key competitive assumption, namely profit maximization? If you have a ton of firms but their motive is not financial success, most of the standard results don't go through. You might appeal to survivorship (with randomly assigned objective functions, profit maximizers gradually take over), but if non-profits have a continual stream of subsidies that does not have to work. If this were any other industry, I'm sure Frey would be among the first to make the standard economist's response: If your preferred tech is easy, has long been tried, and has lower costs without other disadvantages, in a competitive industry why hasn't it long displaced the standard tech? I'm sure a clever person could come up with an externality or asymmetric information market failure argument, but the amazing thing is that Frey doesn't even try here. How about simple coordination failure? The AER is focally viewed as the top econ journal. If one person says the AER sucks and ignores it he mostly hurts his own prospects. A lot of people would have to coordinate on an alternative at once for this to change. I'd say that the key stumbling block to a better theory of academic journals is identifying the real customers and their preferences. Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030- 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 -- Prof. Bryan Caplan Department of Economics George Mason University http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] He lives in deadly terror of agreeing; 'Twould make him seem an ordinary being. Indeed, he's so in love with contradiction, He'll turn against his most profound conviction And with a furious eloquence deplore it, If only someone else is speaking for it. Moliere, *The Misanthrope*
RE: fantastically entertaining paper
Michael E. Etchison wrote: an industry (academic journals) where . . . entry is cheap As a non-academic, I have to wonder -- if getting in is so cheap, why is getting a copy so expensive? Standard armchair econ question, really. If prices are going up, and quantity is going up, we'd suspect demand is up. If quantity is going down, we'd suspect costs are going up. Or maybe price discrimination is getting easier, and you're just looking at the prices the high value customers pay. Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030- 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
Re: fantastically entertaining paper
Bryan D Caplan wrote: Here we have an industry (academic journals) where concentration is low, entry is cheap, and most firms use the same production technology (referees with veto power), even though an alternate technology (editors pick) has long been tried, and is easy to try. Frey claims that it is a market failure not to use this alternate tech, because the standard tech has agency costs, which has the effect of raising the costs to one of the inputs (authors). I must have raised this issue before, but aren't you leaving out a key competitive assumption, namely profit maximization? If you have a ton of firms but their motive is not financial success, most of the standard results don't go through. You might appeal to survivorship (with randomly assigned objective functions, profit maximizers gradually take over), but if non-profits have a continual stream of subsidies that does not have to work. A great many journals are owned by for-profit entities. And subsidies do not undermine the survivorship analysis - subsidies are just another name for a customer revenue stream that profit-maximizing entities would also take into account. How about simple coordination failure? The AER is focally viewed as the top econ journal. If one person says the AER sucks and ignores it he mostly hurts his own prospects. A lot of people would have to coordinate on an alternative at once for this to change. The topic was referee vetoes versus strong editors. There have long been journals with strong editors, and I don't see much social pressure against people who like such journals. There might be other coordination failures with people liking the AER, but if so they must be about some other fixed feature of the AER besides referee vetoes. Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030- 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
RE: fantastically entertaining paper
Robin Hanson: Michael E. Etchison wrote: an industry (academic journals) where . . . entry is cheap As a non-academic, I have to wonder -- if getting in is so cheap, why is getting a copy so expensive? Standard armchair econ question, really. Yes, I know, and I know what we'd suspect. I was wondering if anyone had some grounded explanations. Michael Michael E. Etchison Texas Wholesale Power Report MLE Consulting www.mleconsulting.com 1423 Jackson Road Kerrville, TX 78028 (830) 895-4005
Re: Not such a fantastically entertaining paper
OK Robin so you want to say that consumer wants not truth or relevance but signals about smartness. Then our profession is doing a decent job, but the opportunity cost of this is huge. Economics is a particularly relevant discipline for public policy and social understanding. I believe there our truths in the economic world that are particularly costly not to recognize. Can you make an argument that the unintended consequence of this smartness signalling actually is closer approximations to the truth? If so, then I think you would have a neat argument. BTW, in the economy we can discuss efficiency (technical) because somehow the underlying realities of tastes, technology and resource endowment are reflected in the induced variables of prices and profit/loss. If there was no connection between these, then in what sense would we be able to talk about allocational efficiency? Similarly, in academics if we don't have an underlying reality of truth and the scientific community somehow following the induced variables of prestige, position, power that gets at closer approximations of the underlying reality then in what sense is the academic market efficiently organized? Pete Peter J. Boettke, Deputy Director James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy Department of Economics, MSN 3G4 George Mason University Fairfax, VA 22030 PHONE: 703-993-1149 FAX: 703-993-1133 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] HOMEPAGE: http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/pboettke - Original Message - From: Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 21, 2002 11:14 AM Subject: Re: Not such a fantastically entertaining paper Peter J. Boettke wrote: ... But the bottom line problem with this entrepreneurial hope in the market for academic economics is that we don't have institutions that serve the functions analogous to property, prices and profit and loss. The standard story is that authors have a property right in their articles, which are in effect sold to students, and research patrons. Journals and universities are intermediaries in this process, but all these transactions seem to voluntary, and real money is on the line. What's wrong with this story? P.S.: Robin, I think the statement that entry is cheap is a little dubious. We go through an entire process ... graduate school ... getting a job. ... The topic was entry into the journal industry, which takes even more effort than entry into the professor industry. But I meant easy in the industrial organization sense of closer to free entry than to monopoly. I'm sure its not easy to be a farmer, but farming also seems to be an industry where entry is easy enough to keep the industry competitive. ... Scholarship should never be cheap, nor easy, nor kind ... but I think it is at best a noble lie to believe that the truth wins out in academics ... Careerism, fadism, cults of personality, and generally a waste of intellectual resources describe academic life, not truth seeking and original thinking. I would have thought you'd be more sympathetic. I agree that academia wastes vast resources relative to the goal of seeking truth, but I disagree that this implies a market failure, mainly because I don't think the ultimate customers fundamentally want truth. In fact, I think customers in part want faddism and cults of personality. My working model of academia is that students and research patrons primarily pay to be associated with people who are publicly validated to be smart in certain ways. People try to show that they are smart by publishing writings that are articulate, clever, thought-provoking, require difficult techniques, and anticipate fads. Truth is often a side-effect, but is incidental to the main purposes of the parties involved. Different academic disciplines have settled into equilibria with different mixtures of these elements. I think this model can explain many otherwise puzzling features of academia. [We had a similar discussion of this topic on this list last November] Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030- 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
Re: Not such a fantastically entertaining paper
Wait a minute Alex, I am not sure that journal organization has little to do with the professional organization in the university. Change the nature of the way resarch is published and presented and the research game will change within the academy. Journals are like the arbiter of the rules that govern academic discourse if you change the idea of what a good question is, or more importantly even for this conversation, what a good answer is, then the academic game will change accordingly. I admit to selection bias, but I am not sure we can avoid it on this topic. BTW, I hope nobody views my comments as whining about the profession, because they are not meant to be in that vein. It is just that I think much of what goes on in the profession as so-called research is intellectual masturbation. That is fine in itself but the opportunity cost is a more relevant economics engage in social intercourse. Those of us who want to make this argument are failing to persuade our colleagues of the benefits of this and as a result have nobody to blaim but ourselves. Peter J. Boettke, Deputy Director James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy Department of Economics, MSN 3G4 George Mason University Fairfax, VA 22030 PHONE: 703-993-1149 FAX: 703-993-1133 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] HOMEPAGE: http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/pboettke - Original Message - From: Alex Tabarrok [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 21, 2002 12:50 PM Subject: Re: Not such a fantastically entertaining paper Pete writes We go through an entire process of being cultured to the ways of the profession called graduate school and especially the process of writing a dissertation and getting a job. Then you get more of that as an assistant professor -- especially if you are at a top 20 research university. You learn to value certain journals and types of arguments and dismiss other types of arguments and evidence as not serious. If you resist you are thrown out, if you try to assimilate and fail you are thrown out. Yes, this is correct - this is why journal organization form has very little to do with the substantive issues that you and I care about. This seems obvious to me. The examples you give of good editors are biased because self-selected! Alex -- Dr. Alexander Tabarrok Vice President and Director of Research The Independent Institute 100 Swan Way Oakland, CA, 94621-1428 Tel. 510-632-1366, FAX: 510-568-6040 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: fantastically entertaining paper
I wonder if entry is cheap. To effectively enter this market, you have to do more than edit articles and print copies of the journal. You have to attract valued contributions and thereby, readers. I believe contributors send articles to journals on the basis of their brand name. How can a journal build its brand name? Have any journals sought to build a brand name by paying well-known scholars for their contributions for several years? The most expensive academic journals are in the fields of science, technology and medicine. European commercial publishers who charge thousands for an annual institutional subscription own the most prestigious of these journals. A few years ago a few American universities looked into starting up their own competitors to the STM leaders. Nothing came of it. I suspect they discovered that entry costs were high as was the risk of failure. Academic books cost a lot because their markets are small (300-500 copies on average per title) while production costs are relatively high. Total production costs for an academic press run of 500 copies are in the $30,000 range. Unit sales are so small in part because universities heavily subsidize book production. Even if all the subsidies were dedicated to the demand side (or were eliminated), academic books would be expensive compared to the average trade book. Without production subsidies, however, there would many fewer producers. And the world would be a better place. John Samples Cato Institute -Original Message- From: Michael Etchison [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, June 21, 2002 1:44 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: fantastically entertaining paper Robin Hanson: Michael E. Etchison wrote: an industry (academic journals) where . . . entry is cheap As a non-academic, I have to wonder -- if getting in is so cheap, why is getting a copy so expensive? Standard armchair econ question, really. Yes, I know, and I know what we'd suspect. I was wondering if anyone had some grounded explanations. Michael Michael E. Etchison Texas Wholesale Power Report MLE Consulting www.mleconsulting.com 1423 Jackson Road Kerrville, TX 78028 (830) 895-4005
Re: Not such a fantastically entertaining paper
I agree that academia wastes vast resources relative to the goal of seeking truth, but I disagree that this implies a market failure, mainly because I don't think the ultimate customers fundamentally want truth. In fact, I think customers in part want faddism and cults of personality. Posner, I think, pointed out that there are species of fish that lay thousands of eggs merely to produce one or two offspring that make it to adulthood. Even if we grant that the great bulk of academic publishing is useless dreck, it does not follow that it is wasteful. It may well be that the same net output may be producible with lots of low quality or with a little high quality. How readily high and low quality can be substituted for one another depends on the product. I offer an example from the only industry I know anything about. Grain is usually shipped on large ships, and is dumped into the holds through large chutes. A non-trivial amount is lost in the process, because it isn't worth the cost to save it all (although there have been improvements over the years reducing the loss). The loss is compounded as the grain is transferred, between ships and terminals, and between trains and terminals, many times. A very good way to eliminate the waste is to package the grain into containers and seal them for the duration of the trip. Very little grain is shipped that way (usually expensive seeds), because the lost grain is usually less valuable than the cost of containerizing. Milgrom and Roberts' text mentions the same problem in car production, comparing Toyota and GM. They note that back in the fifties when Toyota was small, inventories were expensive for it relative to the cost of inventories for GM, because GM was so much larger and therefore bore proportionally smaller inventory costs (by the law of large numbers). Hence the use of just-in-time production. Just-in-time requires tight quality controls, because defective parts are a problem if your inputs arrive just as you are using them. If you maintain large parts inventories, you replace defective parts out of inventory. For GM, lower average quality of purchased inventory could produce the same average quality of used inventory, so long as GM bore inventory costs. Toyota's higher inventory costs made that an unprofitable production decision. So, I think the question of whether the production of dreck (or alternatively clever theorizing of no use to anyone) is wasteful requires that we have some idea of how best to produce good research. Clearly, there are journals that exist solely as outlets for economists at little teaching colleges to get in the one or two papers they need for tenure, for no obvious reason. Beyond that, though, it is not at all obvious to me how you get The Problem of Social Cost or The Fable of the Bees while avoiding uninteresting or pointless work. Bill Sjostrom + William Sjostrom Senior Lecturer Department of Economics National University of Ireland, Cork Cork, Ireland +353-21-490-2091 (work) +353-21-427-3920 (fax) +353-21-463-4056 (home) [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ucc.ie/~sjostrom/
Re: fantastically entertaining paper
Robin probably regrets using the word cheap in regard to entry as this has clearly confused some people. As Robin later pointed out he meant cheap to mean the journal industry approximates the economic concept of free entry (more than many other industries we all think of as competitive). Now, I hope that none of us would say that the market for restaurants is not competitive because it costs about $250,000 to start a new restaurant and therefore entry is expensive. Yet some comments regarding entry into the journal market make exactly this mistake. By the way, the journal market has exploded in recent decades with many entrants. Thus, if one is going to complain about the output of the journal market one should look at the preferences of its customers. A parallel I have noted in other context is that sometimes people trained in the Buchanan style of constitutional economics think that all that is required to get better policy is that we change the rules of the game when in truth sometimes there is no choice but to change the preferences of the players. Thus when Pete says Change the nature of the way resarch is published and presented and the research game will change within the academy. Well of course! Who would deny that? :) But the nature of the way research is published and presented is a dependent not an independent variable! Alex -- Dr. Alexander Tabarrok Vice President and Director of Research The Independent Institute 100 Swan Way Oakland, CA, 94621-1428 Tel. 510-632-1366, FAX: 510-568-6040 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Not such a fantastically entertaining paper
Bill Sjostrom wrote: "Clearly, there are journals that exist solely as outlets for economists at little teaching colleges to get in the one or two papers they need for tenure, for no obvious reason." What are some examples of those journals? Also, what are some good lines of research or questions or methods that are not being used or looked at due to the current state of the profession and the way journals are run? Cyril Morong
Re: Not such a fantastically entertaining paper
William Sjostrom wrote: I agree that academia wastes vast resources relative to the goal of seeking truth, but I disagree that this implies a market failure, mainly because I don't think the ultimate customers fundamentally want truth. In fact, I think customers in part want faddism and cults of personality. ... Even if we grant that the great bulk of academic publishing is useless dreck, it does not follow that it is wasteful. Grain is usually shipped on large ships, and is dumped into the holds through large chutes. A non-trivial amount is lost in the process, I agree that the mere fact that of useless dreck does not imply an overall failure. Even an ideal institution for generating truth would probably generate lots of useless dreck in the attempt to find a few valuable gems. My grounds for believing that there is more waste than can be attibuted to this are based on other sorts of observations, like what I think Alex and Pete have in mind.
academic journals
I have taken the liberty of changing the subject line since the discussion seems to have shifted. Given that this is the Armchair list, what would economists make of an industry that works like this: A firm (the university) hires employees (professors) to make products (articles) that are then given gratis to other firms (journal publishers) who produce a product (a journal) that is then sold back to a part of the original firm (the university library) who buys it on behalf of other parties (its faculty) who by and large will not spend their own money on the product (and do so only when there is severe price discrimination in their favor). Academic books fit the same model except the product is sold to the publisher but the proceeds go to the employee and not the firm that originally invested in the writing of the book. Steve Landesberg recently remarked to me in relation to his experience with university administration that it's clear universities are maximizing something, but it's not clear what. Perhaps by publishing journals, universities maximize the quality of students who seek admission. John Samples Cato winmail.dat Description: application/ms-tnef
