Economists spend immense amounts of time ranking journals, partly to decide on monetary and non-monetary professional rewards, partly as pure gossip. There is some imperfect agreement on rankings.
Given that agreement, how should we credit coauthored publications (the overwhelming majority of papers)? For the same quality of paper, with N authors does credit get apportioned as 1/N-does an author of a paper with two authors get 50 percent credit; or is the credit more than that? I would think that in equilibrium credit would be apportioned as 1/N; otherwise I would put a friend’s name on my papers, she would put mine on hers, and we’d both get more credit in total. Two young guys I know say that they do exactly that.
Credit at 1/N seems reasonable and is consistent with an old piece of empirical research (Raymond Sauer, Journal of Political Economy, 1988). But one institution I know of gives you 0.71 credit for a two-authored paper, 0.58 credit if you are one of three authors, 0.5 if one of four (using a credit rule of 1/square root(N)). It just started offering a bonus of $23,000 for a sole-authored publication in one of five top journals. But if you are one of two authors, you get $16,250.
This seems absolutely nuts to me, as it gives explicit monetary incentives to multiply co-authors. Why write one paper and get $23,000 when you can share co-authorships with a friend and get $32,500? Since economists always rise to the challenge of responding to incentives, I would bet that this institution sees a lot more coauthored papers by its faculty than before. Better quality, maybe, although I’m dubious; more coauthors for sure.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
An institution paying cash based on the 1/square root(N) formula?
Oh, this is a system just begging to be gamed…
Unless they feel that a paper’s value increases with the number of authors.
BTW – To any authors at DH’s mentioned institution: I can make my name available for a hefty kickback. How about a paper on ethics and incentives?
This scheme, to have lots of names on a paper, is often handled by putting the chief author(s) first, then everybody else who had anything to do with it.
The whole business becomes more clear if you do something like what Google does: The publication is more valuable as other people quote it or link to it. If you publish it but nobody in your field ever thinks enough of it to refer to it, then it is not worth much.
I roughly recall that in physical science, you really only credit the top three authors, and you give primary credit to the first author.
An interesting related question is: How is credit shared when one author is famous and another is not? For example, if some relatively unknown economists publishes with, say, Greg Mankiw, does he get less credit than he would have had he published it with a lesser known economist.
Perhaps readers would assume Mankiw did all of the great research, since everything Mankiw does seems to be good. On the other hand, maybe the unknown prof did all the real work–why else would Mankiw publish a paper with him?
A similiar question could be raised about graduate students publishing with professors. If the paper is great, do readers assume the prof did most of the research; and if it’s horrible, do readers assume the grad student did most of it? If so, then publishing with a prof as a graduate student would be a horrible deal.
@Martin
Of course the graduate student did all of the work, that’s what they’re there for. Without this “exploitation” by the professor, the student would never get published, and couldn’t go on to become a professor and have her own graduate students to do all the research. I think untenured professors also do some research on occasion.
Better quality through collaborative efforts? What’s wrong with that?
DH is setting up a straw man argument – if economics is supposed to have influence on these things, then there will be a point or diminishing return – where the increase in authors does nothing significant to the quality (or decreases the quality) of the paper.
The scheme of putting your name on a friend’s paper, and your friend’s name on your papers, only works if both people consistently release a similar amount of quality papers. Otherwise, the more prolific author would get less credit than he/she would have received and the less prolific author would get more credit. Even though there would be more overall credit given, the person who wrote more would lose out.
However, given credit of 1 for a sole author , and 2/3 for each of 2 coauthors. It would make sense for the more prolific writer to go along with the scheme as long as the ratio of quality papers written did not exceed 2:1.
The economists in the group may not be familiar with the famous Alpher Bethe Gamow paper which raised interesting questions about “authorship” and credit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher-Bethe-Gamow_paper
As a student I had the privilege of working for a young math professor who was very generous, with me and others, in giving co-authorship credit and I have always appreciated it. Whatever it cost him in the short run it has paid off over his career in the gratitude and respect of his peers.