Dear all,
we are delighted to invite you to the next installment of the APSE talks series, as well as to the accompanying reading circle prior to the talk. The talk will be given by Remco Heesen (LSE).
When: Thursday, 10.04.2025, 15:00 - 17:00
Where: HS 3A, NIG (Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien)
The Division of Cognitive Labour under Poisson Productivity
When a community of academics faces a research problem and multiple methodological approaches to solving it, how much effort should they devote to each approach to maximise their chances of solving the problem and minimise the time to a solution? This problem is known as the division of cognitive labour (DCL). More specifically, Philip Kitcher, Michael Strevens, and Kevin Zollman have asked whether and to what extent academics' expectations of credit for solving the problem can act as an invisible hand to produce an efficient DCL without a need for top-down planning. Here I revisit this question using a modelling framework (key ingredient: academic productivity follows a Poisson distribution) that has more empirical support than Kitcher's, Strevens', and Zollman's, and is also more flexible in that it can be used to address broader questions about credit incentives. The somewhat surprising finding is that in this framework the DCL problem becomes essentially trivial. I'd like to discuss implications for how we think about the model and/or the DCL problem.
Reading Circle (1:15-3 PM):
When: right before the talk - Thursday, 10.04.2025, 13:15 - 15:00
Where: same place - HS 3A, NIG (Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien)
We will focus our discussion on an
article by Kevin Zollman (attached pdf):
As an introduction we suggest this SEP article (especially Chapters 2, 3.1, 4.1 and 4.2):
For further reading regarding the topic:
Best wishes,
Vinzenz Fischer