A New Mechanism to Alleviate the Crises of Confidence in Science With An Application to the Public Goods Game

Luigi Butera , Philip J Grossman , Daniel Houser , John A List , Marie Claire Villeval (1)

1 GATE Lyon Saint-Étienne - Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon - Saint-Etienne

Recently a credibility crisis has taken hold across the social sciences, arguing that a component of Fischer (1935)'s tripod has not been fully embraced: replication. The importance of replications is not debatable scientifically, but researchers and journals' incentives are not sufficient to encourage replications. We analyze a novel, decentralized approach promoting replications through beneficial gains between scholars and editors. We highlight the trade-offs involved in seeking independent replications before submission to journals, and demonstrate the operation of this method via an investigation of the effects of Knightian uncertainty on cooperation in public goods games, a pervasive feature but largely unexplored in the literature.

Mots clés: Replication; science; public goods; uncertainty

Domaines: Economies et finances

Luigi Butera, Philip J Grossman, Daniel Houser, John A List, Marie Claire Villeval. A New Mechanism to Alleviate the Crises of Confidence in Science With An Application to the Public Goods Game. 2022. ⟨hal-03725592⟩