Scientific teamwork.

• Author: Gans, Joshua
• Position: Research Summaries - Team performance in many settings has long challenged

Team performance in many settings has long challenged economic thinking. Even when monetary incentives are present, it is hard to structure those incentives to overcome moral hazard and other issues of free riding, especially when team tasks interact with one another. This is especially true for scientific teams, where the challenges are multiplied: The rewards tend to be nonmonetary and thus principals--to the extent they even exist--face additional complexity in structuring those rewards. To add to the challenges, in recent decades science has become more complex and the knowledge frontier is now harder to expand than ever. This manifests itself in many changes, among the most important being a change in the life cycle of scientific careers and an increase in the prevalence and size of research teams.

Along with our coauthor Michael Bikard, we have looked at the choices scientific teams make, both in terms of how they form and in how they signal to the outside world the contributions of individual team members.

Who Gets What?

When entrepreneurs found startups, they agree on a division of equity between themselves and investors. Regardless of the ultimate value of the venture, the division of shares determines what each party owns. When teams form a scientific collaboration, one could imagine the same thing occurring. Two collaborators put their names on a paper and then whatever the paper's scientific value, credit would be divided equally between them.

However, while equity allows for a definitive and legally binding split of future profits, things are not so simple with scientific output. For starters, the total value created by a publication is not necessarily fixed and independent of the number of authors (say, in terms of citations and impact). The total value to the career prospects of authors from a two-author publication may be more than twice what they would receive had they produced two single-author publications, even of the same quality. Likewise, the value of the publication may be much greater for a team of younger scientists than for an older, more-established group of collaborators. In other words, there is nothing to stop "the market"--a shorthand for the complex process that determines the incremental effect of a new paper on the professional standing of its authors--from assigning shares of the publications value that sum to more than one for the output of scientific teams.

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The composition of teams also matters in the market for scientific attribution, which may look at who is part of the team and be influenced in assigning credit by their prior reputations and skills. Thus while attribution may split evenly among authors, it may also be unevenly distributed by outside observers. The great sociologist of science Robert Merton noted that often a Matthew effect arose in that those scientists who had the better reputation upon entering a collaboration would seem to receive a disproportionate share of the benefits from collaborative output. (1)

These issues of attribution introduce a number of complexities. For instance, it is difficult to envisage an economic equilibrium in which a scientist actually contributes less to a project and yet is persistently rewarded more because the market misjudges his contribution on the basis of prior reputation. The equilibrium should...