This CAREER award supports research to develop a more unified theory of scientific incentives using a broadly economic methodology. The educational and training aspects of the project includes a number of activities such as course development, a summer school for undergraduates, and mentoring of graduate students.
Intellectual Merit
Utilizing economic modeling and computer simulation, this project aims to understand how incentives typically faced by scientists (to secure funding, get promoted, publish papers, etc.) facilitate or harm the advancement of science. Policymakers, science commentators, and scientists themselves have begun to worry that such incentives encourage scientists to engage in behaviors that would be counterproductive to science as a whole such as choosing projects that will not significantly advance knowledge, or misrepresenting or even fabricating their findings. Rather than focusing on single case studies, which can sometimes be misleading, this project aims to uncover the underlying relationships between the incentives faced by scientists and their ultimate behavior. The results from the project will help to uncover whether there is reason to worried about the state of contemporary science. Where the incentives are misaligned, the investigators will attempt to suggest alternative methods.
Potential Broader Impacts
The results from this project could eventually help to guide science policymakers in understanding how to create a reward system for science that will make the enterprise of science most efficient. They may serve to suggest recommendations that would make more efficient use of public money by enhancing the rate and reliability of scientific discoveries. The project also includes a number of pedagogical activities such as a freshman seminar, a philosophy of economics course, materials for a summer school course in mathematical modeling for philosophers, and improved dissemination of materials for an undergraduate summer school course in logic and formal epistemology. This sort of work is well suited to getting students involved at a fairly high level in fairly short order.
