andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1585 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Someone I don’t know writes in: I have followed your thoughts on plagiarism rather closely, and I ran across something in the Economics literature that I felt might interest you (and if you were to share this, I’d rather remain anonymous as a junior faculty not looking to step on toes anywhere). I know you aren’t the plagiarism police, but figured you would have some input. I’ve been reading up on some literature regarding all-pay auctions for some research I have been working on and came across an interesting paper in J. Political Economy (1998) with the following intro: “Many economic allocations are decided by competition for a prize on the basis of costly activities. For example, monopoly licenses may be awarded to the person (or group) that lobbies the hardest (Tullock, 1967), or tickets may be given to those who wait in line the longest (Holt and Sherman 1982). In such contests, losers’ efforts are costly and are generally not compensated. These situations, which are esp
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 I’ve been reading up on some literature regarding all-pay auctions for some research I have been working on and came across an interesting paper in J. [sent-3, score-0.373]
2 Political Economy (1998) with the following intro: “Many economic allocations are decided by competition for a prize on the basis of costly activities. [sent-4, score-0.996]
3 For example, monopoly licenses may be awarded to the person (or group) that lobbies the hardest (Tullock, 1967), or tickets may be given to those who wait in line the longest (Holt and Sherman 1982). [sent-5, score-0.304]
4 In such contests, losers’ efforts are costly and are generally not compensated. [sent-6, score-0.309]
5 These situations, which are especially common in nonmarket allocations, are of concern to economists precisely because competition involves the expenditure of real resources, or ‘‘rent-seeking’’ behavior. [sent-7, score-0.54]
6 Krueger (1974) estimated the annual welfare costs of rent seeking induced by price and quantity controls to be 7 percent of gross national product in India and somewhat higher in Turkey. [sent-8, score-0.865]
7 Economic Behavior & Organization (2006, 8 years later) by different authors, with the following introductory passage: “Many economic allocations are decided by competition for a prize on the basis of costly activities. [sent-10, score-0.996]
8 Some well-known examples for such competitions are research and development (R&D;) races, political campaigns, awarding of monopoly licenses, selling franchises, and so on. [sent-11, score-0.286]
9 In such contests, participants’ efforts are quite costly, and losers are not compensated for these efforts. [sent-12, score-0.21]
10 To model such situations, in which competition involves real expenditures, or ‘rent seeking’ behavior, researchers find the all-pay auction quite appealing”………………”It turns out that in a variety of cases where rent-seeking behavior is exercised, total efforts exceed the value of the prize. [sent-13, score-0.731]
11 Krueger (1974), for example, estimates that annual welfare costs induced by price and quantity controls in India are approximately 7% of gross national product. [sent-14, score-0.676]
12 ” We see similar patterns in the conclusion sections (same order as above): (1) “The all-pay auction has been widely studied because it is an allocation mechanism in which competition for a prize involves the expenditure of real resources, for example, lobbying. [sent-16, score-1.25]
13 ” (2) “The all-pay auction has been widely studied because it is often used as an allocation mechanism in competitions for a prize where players’ effort involves the expenditure of resources. [sent-17, score-1.222]
14 Examples of such competitions are lobbying,…” I thought I had accidentally downloaded the same paper twice until looking at the title again. [sent-18, score-0.331]
15 The second article does cite the first, but does not give credit specifically to the introduction. [sent-22, score-0.19]
16 It cites that it is comparing results with that paper, and ultimately the meat of the paper is slightly different. [sent-23, score-0.164]
17 My reply: I don’t know anything about this area of research, but it does seem a bit tacky to quote someone else without the use of quotation marks. [sent-25, score-0.21]
18 I heard from Uri Gneezy, the author of the 2006 article, who writes: Just want to set things right: our [Gneezy and Smorodinsky's] paper is an experimental test of the [earlier] JPE modeling paper. [sent-29, score-0.164]
19 It is based on that paper; we cite the JPE paper 8 (! [sent-30, score-0.287]
20 As we clearly state in the paper, the motivating economic issue and literature are the same. [sent-33, score-0.17]
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Introduction: Someone I don’t know writes in: I have followed your thoughts on plagiarism rather closely, and I ran across something in the Economics literature that I felt might interest you (and if you were to share this, I’d rather remain anonymous as a junior faculty not looking to step on toes anywhere). I know you aren’t the plagiarism police, but figured you would have some input. I’ve been reading up on some literature regarding all-pay auctions for some research I have been working on and came across an interesting paper in J. Political Economy (1998) with the following intro: “Many economic allocations are decided by competition for a prize on the basis of costly activities. For example, monopoly licenses may be awarded to the person (or group) that lobbies the hardest (Tullock, 1967), or tickets may be given to those who wait in line the longest (Holt and Sherman 1982). In such contests, losers’ efforts are costly and are generally not compensated. These situations, which are esp
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Introduction: Part 1. The ideal policy Basbøll, as always, gets right to the point: Andrew Gelman is not the plagiarism police because there is no such thing as the plagiarism police. But, he continues: There is, at any self-respecting university and any self-respecting academic journal, a plagiarism policy, and there sure as hell is a “morality” of writing in the world of scholarship. The cardinal rule is: don’t use other people’s words or ideas without attributing those words or ideas to the people you got them from. What to do when the plagiarism (or, perhaps, sloppy quotation, to use a less loaded word) comes to light? Everyone makes mistakes, but if you make one you have to correct it. Don’t explain why your mistake isn’t very serious or “set things right” by pointing to the “obvious” signs of your good intentions. . . . Don’t say you’ve cleared it with the original author. The real victim of your crime is not the other writer; it’s your reader. That’s whose trust you’ve be
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Introduction: Stan Liebowitz writes: Have you ever heard of an article being retracted in economics? I know you have only been doing this for a few years but I suspect that the answer is that none or very few are retracted. No economist would ever deceive another. There is virtually no interest in detecting cheating. And what good would that do if there is no form of punishment? I say this because I think I have found a case in one of our top journals but the editor allowed the authors of the original article to write an anonymous referee report defending themselves and used this report to reject my comment even though an independent referee recommended publication. My reply: I wonder how this sort of thing will change in the future as journals become less important. My impression is that, on one side, researchers are increasingly citing NBER reports, Arxiv preprints, and the like; while, from the other direction, journals such as Science and Nature are developing the reputations of being “t
Introduction: As regular readers of this blog are aware, I am fascinated by academic and scientific cheating and the excuses people give for it. Bruno Frey and colleagues published a single article (with only minor variants) in five different major journals, and these articles did not cite each other. And there have been several other cases of his self-plagiarism (see this review from Olaf Storbeck). I do not mind the general practice of repeating oneself for different audiences—in the social sciences, we call this Arrow’s Theorem —but in this case Frey seems to have gone a bit too far. Blogger Economic Logic has looked into this and concluded that this sort of common practice is standard in “the context of the German(-speaking) academic environment,” and what sets Frey apart is not his self-plagiarism or even his brazenness but rather his practice of doing it in high-visibility journals. Economic Logic writes that “[Frey's] contribution is pedagogical, he found a good and interesting
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Introduction: I’m postponing today’s scheduled post (“Empirical implications of Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models”) to continue the lively discussion from yesterday, What if I were to stop publishing in journals? . An example: my papers with Basbøll Thomas Basbøll and I got into a long discussion on our blogs about business school professor Karl Weick and other cases of plagiarism copying text without attribution. We felt it useful to take our ideas to the next level and write them up as a manuscript, which ended up being logical to split into two papers. At that point I put some effort into getting these papers published, which I eventually did: To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime went into American Scientist and When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences will appear in Sociological Methods and Research. The second paper, in particular, took some effort to place; I got some advice from colleagues in sociology as to where
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Introduction: Someone I don’t know writes in: I have followed your thoughts on plagiarism rather closely, and I ran across something in the Economics literature that I felt might interest you (and if you were to share this, I’d rather remain anonymous as a junior faculty not looking to step on toes anywhere). I know you aren’t the plagiarism police, but figured you would have some input. I’ve been reading up on some literature regarding all-pay auctions for some research I have been working on and came across an interesting paper in J. Political Economy (1998) with the following intro: “Many economic allocations are decided by competition for a prize on the basis of costly activities. For example, monopoly licenses may be awarded to the person (or group) that lobbies the hardest (Tullock, 1967), or tickets may be given to those who wait in line the longest (Holt and Sherman 1982). In such contests, losers’ efforts are costly and are generally not compensated. These situations, which are esp
Introduction: As regular readers of this blog are aware, I am fascinated by academic and scientific cheating and the excuses people give for it. Bruno Frey and colleagues published a single article (with only minor variants) in five different major journals, and these articles did not cite each other. And there have been several other cases of his self-plagiarism (see this review from Olaf Storbeck). I do not mind the general practice of repeating oneself for different audiences—in the social sciences, we call this Arrow’s Theorem —but in this case Frey seems to have gone a bit too far. Blogger Economic Logic has looked into this and concluded that this sort of common practice is standard in “the context of the German(-speaking) academic environment,” and what sets Frey apart is not his self-plagiarism or even his brazenness but rather his practice of doing it in high-visibility journals. Economic Logic writes that “[Frey's] contribution is pedagogical, he found a good and interesting
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Introduction: Stan Liebowitz writes: Have you ever heard of an article being retracted in economics? I know you have only been doing this for a few years but I suspect that the answer is that none or very few are retracted. No economist would ever deceive another. There is virtually no interest in detecting cheating. And what good would that do if there is no form of punishment? I say this because I think I have found a case in one of our top journals but the editor allowed the authors of the original article to write an anonymous referee report defending themselves and used this report to reject my comment even though an independent referee recommended publication. My reply: I wonder how this sort of thing will change in the future as journals become less important. My impression is that, on one side, researchers are increasingly citing NBER reports, Arxiv preprints, and the like; while, from the other direction, journals such as Science and Nature are developing the reputations of being “t
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Introduction: A correspondent writes: Since you have commented on scientific fraud a lot. I wanted to give you an update on the Diederik Stapel case. I’d rather not see my name on the blog if you would elaborate on this any further. It is long but worth the read I guess. I’ll first give you the horrible details which will fill you with a mixture of horror and stupefied amazement at Stapel’s behavior. Then I’ll share Stapel’s abject apology, which might make you feel sorry for the guy. First the amazing story of how he perpetrated the fraud: There has been an interim report delivered to the rector of Tilburg University. Tilburg University is cooperating with the university of Amsterdam and of Groningen in this case. The results are pretty severe, I provide here a quick and literal translation of some comments by the chairman of the investigation committee. This report is publicly available on the university webpage (along with some other things of interest) but in Dutch: What
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Introduction: Part 1. The ideal policy Basbøll, as always, gets right to the point: Andrew Gelman is not the plagiarism police because there is no such thing as the plagiarism police. But, he continues: There is, at any self-respecting university and any self-respecting academic journal, a plagiarism policy, and there sure as hell is a “morality” of writing in the world of scholarship. The cardinal rule is: don’t use other people’s words or ideas without attributing those words or ideas to the people you got them from. What to do when the plagiarism (or, perhaps, sloppy quotation, to use a less loaded word) comes to light? Everyone makes mistakes, but if you make one you have to correct it. Don’t explain why your mistake isn’t very serious or “set things right” by pointing to the “obvious” signs of your good intentions. . . . Don’t say you’ve cleared it with the original author. The real victim of your crime is not the other writer; it’s your reader. That’s whose trust you’ve be
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Introduction: Someone I don’t know writes in: I have followed your thoughts on plagiarism rather closely, and I ran across something in the Economics literature that I felt might interest you (and if you were to share this, I’d rather remain anonymous as a junior faculty not looking to step on toes anywhere). I know you aren’t the plagiarism police, but figured you would have some input. I’ve been reading up on some literature regarding all-pay auctions for some research I have been working on and came across an interesting paper in J. Political Economy (1998) with the following intro: “Many economic allocations are decided by competition for a prize on the basis of costly activities. For example, monopoly licenses may be awarded to the person (or group) that lobbies the hardest (Tullock, 1967), or tickets may be given to those who wait in line the longest (Holt and Sherman 1982). In such contests, losers’ efforts are costly and are generally not compensated. These situations, which are esp
Introduction: A colleague recently sent me a copy of some articles on the estimation of treatment interactions (a topic that’s interested me for awhile). One of the articles, which appeared in the Lancet in 2000, was called “ Subgroup analysis and other (mis)uses of baseline data in clinical trials ,” by Susan F. Assmann, Stuart J. Pocock, Laura E. Enos, and Linda E. Kasten. . . . Hey, wait a minute–I know Susan Assmann! Well, I sort of know her. When I was a freshman in college, I asked my adviser, who was an applied math prof, if I could do some research. He connected me to Susan, who was one of his Ph.D. students, and she gave me a tiny part of her thesis to work on. The problem went as follows. You have a function f(x), for x going from 0 to infinity, that is defined as follows. Between 0 and 1, f(x)=x. Then, for x higher than 1, f’(x) = f(x) – f(x-1). The goal is to figure out what f(x) does. I think I’m getting this right here, but I might be getting confused on some of the detai
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