A piece of criticism to Tyler Cowen (as you probably understood by now, in general he is one of my favourite econbloggers): for an academic economist, he is extremely slow at times. For instance, he only found out now about Ariel Rubinstein’s very interesting Econometrica article published… months ago (and we are talking about Econometrica here). Come on…
And a similar criticism to Greg Mankiw’s recent point on surnames in academia by Einav and Yariv, in the Journal of Economics Perspectives. By the way, here’s a recent related paper on the order of authors in published papers, from a psychological perspective. There is a short description of it, highlighted in the current edition of Science. Here’s the essence (which, as most results in psychology, seems ex-post obvious 🙂
“An established and unsurprising characteristic of people working within teams is that each individual believes that he or she makes a disproportionately large contribution to the group output, so that the summed estimates are greater than the whole. These self-appraisals can be tempered if individuals are encouraged to regard what other team members do, and this shift in perceptions is thought to be conducive to group harmony and satisfaction”
PS. Now that I mentioned it, I am perhaps too slow with my own research because I always read first any interesting recently published study… Hmmm. Not good.
