Posts filed under ‘Methods/Methodology/Theory of Science’
Data Sharing, When It Might Really Matter
| Peter Klein |
Social scientists aren’t the only ones reluctant to share raw data. Medical researchers are equally touchy about it, even when granting other people access to the data could lead to real breakthroughs. Biostatistician Andrew Vickers writes in yesterday’s Times about his experiences trying to replicate or extend cancer studies:
Not long ago, I asked a respected cancer researcher if he could send me raw data from a trial he had recently published. He refused. Sharing data would make the study team members “uncomfortable,” he said, as I might use this to “cast doubt” on their results. . . .
[W]e wrote to [another research team] and asked whether they would share their data. They refused on the grounds that they might consider a similar analysis at some point in the future. But years have passed, no such analyses have been forthcoming and few patients are benefiting from what could be a very effective drug. . . .
When a colleague and I wanted to analyze the data from a completed breast cancer trial, merely getting permission to speak to the study’s organizing committee required a one-hour phone call with the scientist in charge of the agenda. Only after another one-hour call with the committee itself were we allowed to submit a formal proposal — to which we received no response. . . .
Researchers give all kinds of reasons for refusing to share — concerns about patient confidentiality, appropriate research methods, and so on — but, Vickers concludes, “the real issue here has more to do with status and career than with any loftier considerations. Scientists don’t want to be scooped by their own data, or have someone else challenge their conclusions with a new analysis.”
Thanks to Research on Innovation blog for the lead.
Schools of Thought in Behavioral Economics
| Peter Klein |
Gary Lynne sent me John Tomer’s paper from the June 2007 Journal of Socio-Economics, “What is Behavioral Economics?” Tomer summarizes the various strands of behavioral economics and scores each according to “narrowness,” “rigidity,” “intolerance,” “mechanicalness,” “separateness,” and “individualism.” Coverage includes the Carnegie tradition, Katona’s Michigan school, modern experimental economics, Akerlof’s behavioral macro, and more. Tomer defines the field more broadly than I would — he includes evolutionary economics à la Nelson and Winter, for example — but the commentary is insightful.
Economists on Interdisciplinarity
| Peter Klein |
I missed the ASSA/AEA session “What Should Be the Core of Graduate Economics?” featuring Susan Athey, Ed Gleaser, Bo Honoré, Blake Lebaron, Derek Neal, and Michael Woodford but there is a write-up in the Chronicle (gated, though a free version is temporarily available here). Gleaser offers perhaps the most interesting comment for the O&M crowd:
“We actually shouldn’t be thinking narrowly in terms of first-year economics.” . . . “We should be thinking about first-year social science. The whole division between economics, sociology, and political science feels like a hangover from the 19th century. So many of the people in our profession are working on problems that have traditionally been seen as part of sociology or political science.
“We should probably be rethinking from the ground up all of the social sciences,” Mr. Glaeser continued. “A more attractive model might be a first-year course sequence that trains a social scientist to work on anything, rather than having separate first-year economics, sociology, and political science course work. But maybe that’s a discussion for a different panel.”
My guess is that such a first-year sequence would have two much economics-based sociology, economics-based political science, and the like to satisfy our friends at orgtheory.net. But it is an intriguing possibility. (more…)
Why Study the Humanities?
| Peter Klein |
Stanley Fish (not one of my favorites) channels G. H. Hardy:
To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good.
What about the social sciences? Certainly they purport to be”useful,” in a way that the humanities do not. Scholars of business administration hope their research improves business practice. Economists maintain that sound public policy requires the economist’s unique understanding of complex social phenomena. (more…)
Sociology Quote of the Day
| Peter Klein |
Jeremy Freese, trolling the comment threads at our good twin site:
As for sociology, it’s been more a cloud/confederacy than a discipline for more than 30 years anyway, bound together by a determined resolution to ignore the wild number of pairwise combinations of self-described sociologists who have nothing whatsoever in common intellectually except leftward politics.
Now, you can bet that if I’d written that I’d be hearing from the boys over at orgtheory.
Economists on Economics
| Peter Klein |
We’ve blogged on some of these papers already (1, 2), but it’s worth mentioning that the April 2007 issue of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology includes a symposium called “Reflections and Self-Reflections on the Economics Profession”:
- “Economists’ Opinions of Economists’ Work” by William L. Davis
- “The Input Relationship Between Co-Authors in Economics: A Production Function Approach” by Marshall H. Medoff
- “Is There a Free-Market Economist in the House? The Policy Views of American Economic Association Members” by Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern
- “What Do Economists Talk About? A Linguistic Analysis of Published Writing in Economic Journals” by Nils Goldschmidt and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
Good reading for the narcissistic economist (is there another kind?).
Experimental Methods in Development Economics
| Peter Klein |
Readers interested in the J-PAL approach to development may enjoy an upcoming conference on “New Techniques in Development Economics,” 19-20 June at Australian National University. “[T]he conference will focus on new methodological approaches to development economics research, particularly field experiments and natural experiments.” Details, courtesy of SSRN, are below the fold. (more…)
A Critique of Economics from an Unusual Direction
| Steve Phelan |
Charlie Munger, the second largest shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway after Warren Buffett (and a member of the Forbes Wealthiest 400) gave a speech at UCSB a few years ago. The full transcript of his speech can be found here. (more…)
Metanomics
| Steve Phelan |
I have used a lot of simulation studies in past papers and I currently sit on the editorial board of the Journal of Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory (CMOT). However, I was surprised to stumble upon an emerging field in economics called “metanomics.” (more…)
Relevance and Practice
| Steve Phelan |
Peter, thank you for the warm introduction. In addition to 15 years in academia, I also had another life working in strategic planning in major corporations in Australia and undertaking the odd strategy consulting gig. I’ve also had the pleasure of teaching executive courses on four continents.
In all this time, the most common critique I encounter is the lack of relevance of academic courses to the “real world”. I am sure that many readers will agree that the 1980s and 1990s were an exciting time to be a strategy practitioner or researcher. The work of Porter and Barney (among many others) brought a level of rigor to the discipline that promised to revolutionize the practice of strategy.
(more…)
The Curious Case of Hans Werner Gottinger
| Peter Klein |
From Joshua Gans I learn that Research Policy has officially retracted a 1993 article by Hans Werner Gottinger which copies substantial passages from a 1980 article published in the Journal of Business. A lengthy editorial in the September 2007 issue of Research Policy explains the case. Apparently Gottinger is a serial plagiarist who has regularly copied material from previously published papers, without acknowledgement, and has falsified his CV by listing positions and affiliations with universities and institutes that never existed or never employed him. This article in Nature provides details (the Research Policy editorial will be gated for some readers).
The entire incident is very sad, and suggests that academic dishonesty may be much more common than is usually thought. One low-cost suggestion for improvement: publishers should check key words and phrases from every paper — or even the entire text — against the archives from Google Scholar, JSTOR, Google Books, and other full-text databases of academic publications. That won’t catch everything, but will likely catch at least some cases. Surely the Google cache has made life harder for plagiarists. (Students, beware!)
Qualitative Comparative Analysis
| Peter Klein |
I learned about Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) from Peer Fiss at last month’s Sundance conference on comparative organizations. QCA is a kind of cluster analysis that is said by its proponents to be superior to linear regression for identifying causal relationships among variables in small samples. Kogut, MacDuffie, and Ragin (2004) and Fiss (2007) apply QCA to organizational problems. If you’re interested in learning more you might drop by the EGOS Colloquium in Amsterdam next July for a special session on QCA and similar methods, “Comparing Organizations: New Approaches to Using Case Study, Small-N, and Set-Theoretical Methods.”
NB: I was reminded of the Sundance conference, and the relations between economists and sociologists, when I had dinner with a prominent labor economist at last weekend’s Kauffman symposium on entrepreneurship data. He said he was tired of labor economics meetings — “all anyone talks about is identification, identification, identification” — and was thinking about attending the Academy of Management conference to broaden his perspective. I responded that after a few days at the AoM he might be dying for someone to mention identification!
Kauffman Symposium on Entrepreneurship Data
| Peter Klein |
I head to Kansas City today for the Kauffman symposium on entrepreneurship and innovation data, where Mike Sykuta and I will give a presentation on the CORI contracts library. Descriptions of all the data sets to be presented are available at SSRN.
I’m curious to see how the participants will address the issues of measurement and definition that are particularly thorny in entrepreneurship research.
. . . And If You Can’t Teach, Teach Gym
| Peter Klein |
You know the old adage: If you can, do; if you can’t, teach. Is it true for business?
A paper in the August 2007 Academy of Management Perspectives, “Do Business School Professors Make Good Executive Managers?” by Bin Jiang and Patrick Murphy (full text; abstract; press release), identifies 217 firms with former business-school professors in management positions and finds that these firms have higher revenues-per-employee than a control group matched by industry, location, and firm size. Faculty making early exits from their academic careers appear to be the most valuable, while neither academic area nor business-school ranking seem to matter. Conclusion:
Executive managers learn from past experiences when they draw the right lessons from those experiences. But experience alone is not enough. Given the rigorous training professors receive in order to design research that objectively parses error and data, one final supposition is that they may be particularly competent at delineating patterns in complex management and organizational experiences. They may also be especially capable of continually developing innovative questions that lead to information useful for executive decision-making amidst uncertainty.
I enjoyed reading the paper. Certainly I like to think that I’d command a high salary if I chose to give up my cushy professor lifestyle for the real world. However, I don’t find the empirical analysis convincing. Here’s why: (more…)
J-PAL Update
| Peter Klein |
We reported earlier on MIT’s Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a research and policy center that advocates using randomized controlled trials instead of traditional econometric methods to evaluate the effects of various programs. J-PAL is featured in this week’s issue of Nature, an unusual recognition for social-science research. (HT: 3quarks)
Reflections on the McQuinn Entrepreneurship Conference
| Peter Klein |
Last week’s McQuinn Center conference on entrepreneurship in Kansas City was a great success, with some 75 participants from places like Nepal, Norway, the UK, and Peru as well as the US and Canada. Keynoters Cornelia Flora, Pierre Desrochers, Sandy Kemper, and Randy Westgren challenged and inspired the group and the papers and discussions highlighted a variety of innovative entrepreneurship research topics, theories, and methods. Papers and presentations are now available on the conference website.
I had the pleasure of offering introductory and closing remarks, and I’ll share here some reflections about the state of the field and suggestions for moving forward. (more…)
Economists and Sociologists: Can’t We All Just Get Along?
| Peter Klein |
I haven’t blogged much on the Comparative Organizations conference hosted by Dave Whetten, Teppo Felin, and Brayden King. It was a terrific conference and I enjoyed myself very much but, as the lone economist in a group dominated by sociologists, I found the experience a little disorienting. Teppo, Brayden, and Gordon Smith — another non-sociologist participant-observer — have posted their reflections and, when Teppo sent this picture of Gordon and me (riding the chairlift at Sundance and no doubt engaged in deep, philosophical conversation), I remembered that I wanted to write something. So here goes.
1. Organizational economists and organizational sociologists are generally interested in the same phenomena. What are the characteristics and performance attributes of various forms of organization? How do social and market conditions, formal institutions, government policy, culture, and the like affect organizations? How do organizations change through time?
2. We differ profoundly, however, in how we try to answer these questions. (more…)
Pomo Periscope XV: Orientalistic Pomo
| Nicolai Foss |
One of most influential modern disciples of pomo was the late Edward Saïd, a follower of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. His famous, highly problematic, but surprisingly widely accepted thesis in Orientalism concerns the (alleged) European construction of the Islamic orient as a something radically different from Europe, a construction that developed from the 18th century on and became an instrument of European colonialism and imperialism vis-a-vis the Orient. However, the construction was just that, a mere construction; “Orientalism” was at best a mirror of Europe and not of the Islamic “Orient.” (Here is an intro to the critique of Saïd, and here is a forthcoming bashing). (more…)
Terence Hutchison (1912-2007)
| Peter Klein |
Terence W. Hutchison, the iconoclastic British methodologist and historian of economic thought, died today. Hutchison’s Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory (1938) was an early and influential attempt to incorporate logical positivism into economic method. Frank Knight’s excellent 1940 article, “What is ‘Truth’ in Economics?” is framed as a reply to Hutchison. Hutchison later sparred with Fritz Machlup on Mises’s methodology; Murray Rothbard sided with Hutchison. I enjoyed parts of Hutchison’s The Politics and Philosophy of Economics: Marxians, Keynesians and Austrians (1981). And who can forget his distinction between “Hayek I” and “Hayek II”?
NB: In an otherwise favorable review of my edited volume, The Fortunes of Liberalism, vol. 4 of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Mark Blaug took me to task for consistently misspelling Hutchison as “Hutchinson.” Good thing I left in that error to distract reviewers from the other errors!
The Future That Never Was
| Peter Klein |
I’ve been thinking about Oskar Morgenstern, specifically his collaboration with John von Neumann (mentioned briefly here). The relationships between Morgenstern and von Neumann, and between Morgenstern and his Habilitation supervisor Ludwig von Mises, raise interesting questions about the possible “Austrian” roots of game theory. (See the discussion by this brilliant economist-blogger.)
Some of Morgenstern’s most important works — Economic Prediction (1928), “Perfect Foresight and Economic Equilibrium” (1935), and On the Accuracy of Economic Observations (1950) — deal with problems of prediction in economics. (Morgenstern holds to a middle ground between the perfect-foresight, rational expectations view of Lucas and Sargeant and the “radical uncertainty” position associated with Shackle and Lachmann.)
Prediction was on my mind when I stumbled across a reference (in yesterday’s WSJ) to the Paleo-Future Blog, a fun site dealing with past predictions about technological progress. Even just a few decades ago everyone assumed that by 2007 we’d have personal robots, flying cars, and push-button meals. (We do have personal communicators, microwave ovens, and an internet nobody foresaw.)
See also this review of Daniel Wilson’s Where’s My Jetpack?
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