Working Paper: NBER ID: w18958
Authors: Michal Bikard; Fiona E. Murray; Joshua Gans
Abstract: When do scientists and other knowledge workers organize into collaborative teams and why do they do so for some projects and not others? At the core of this important organizational choice is, we argue, a tradeoff between the productive efficiency of collaboration and the credit allocation that arises after the completion of collaborative work. In this paper, we explore this tradeoff by developing a model to structure our understanding of the factors shaping researcher collaborative choices in particular the implicit allocation of credit among participants in scientific projects. We then use the annual research activity of 661 faculty scientists at one institution over a 30-year period to explore the tradeoff between collaboration and reward at the individual faculty level and to infer critical parameters in the organization of scientific work.
Keywords: Collaboration; Scientific Work; Credit Allocation; Productivity
JEL Codes: O31; O33
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Collaboration (O36) | Quality of published work (L15) |
| Collaboration (O36) | Number of publications attributed to individual scientists (A14) |
| Collaboration (O36) | Credit allocation for collaborative work (D26) |