Geschrieben für einen bestimmten Beruf, aber fand das sehr gut zu lesen.
5.3 Shrinking the pie
Even though our profession is characterized by non-rivalry, we sometimes act as if we have huge rivalry – as if making others lose automatically causes us to win. The worst example is the anonymous trashing of our colleagues on internet forums. Such forums are the cancer of our profession. They lambast others’ work, their character, and their personal lives, sometimes involving sexist or racist comments. No other profession to my knowledge has such forums. Our students, our executive education clients, our university administrators, those who donate to our school, and companies who sponsor conferences and best paper prizes would be aghast if they saw this side of our profession.
Our profession is enhanced by criticism and challenge, but only within a framework of accountability. A discussion is public, so if a discussant is below the belt, her own reputation is harmed. A referee report is anonymous to the authors, but visible to the Editor. But message forums allow people to post false allegations with zero consequences. Doing so is like urinating in a swimming pool. It can be done without anyone noticing it's you, spreads easily, and can't be easily taken back. The damage only subsides once everything is sufficiently diluted, which takes years.
Now one might claim it's OK to read these forums, as long as you don't post on them, but doing so contributes to advertising revenue. Is a platform where our colleagues get vilified something we really want to support? We might instead argue that reading them is a way to obtain information about the profession. But by trying to ‘rationalize’ it this way, we're telling ourselves ‘rational lies’. Ours is a profession characterized by evidence. We can't publish a conclusion without it being based on research, which has been vetted diligently by a review team. These forums allow people to post claims without any substantiation; while we might think we'll apply the appropriate discounting, once you've heard an allegation, it's difficult to unhear it even if false. There are far more reliable channels to keep abreast of what's going on.14 And viewing such forums pollutes the reader with endless negativity or – worse – misinforms our decisions (e.g. we might not submit to a journal if we believe it's biased, or approach a professor if he's been labelled a predator). If you step into a swimming pool in which others have urinated, you get contaminated yourself.
A second way in which we practice rivalry is through Schadenfreude. If someone's paper is destroyed in a discussion, overturned, or retracted, we're secretly delighted – particularly if it's a high-profile person. We think reducing their slice leaves more of the pie for us. But the entire pie shrinks if outsiders view academic research as irreplicable. If a paper is indeed irreplicable or flawed, the researchers who point this out are creating a public good. However, we often react positively due to the embarrassment for the original authors, not because the criticism helps science evolve.
Third, we can shrink the pie through being territorial about our own agenda. If we work in (say) sustainable finance, we want to position ourselves as the only academic expert in sustainable finance. We refuse to disseminate others’ work; in contrast, we may trash it. But reducing our colleagues’ slice of the pie doesn't mean more for us – instead, the pie will be grabbed by others outside our profession. Companies, consultancies, and think tanks are all putting out their own research. While some practitioner papers are informative, most don't aim to be a scientific analysis of the data but to support the organization's pre-existing position or yield a conclusion that the public likes and thus boosts its image. These organizations may not have the expertise or incentives to produce high-quality research, but they certainly have the resources to market it. If we don't promote the research of our profession as a whole because we're only focused on tooting our own horn, this leaves the rest of the pie up for grabs – and it will be grabbed, by companies and consultancies.
A lion can't catch a springbok in a race. So the lion waits for springboks to fight with each other and then attacks. I don't want to be apocalyptic, but our entire profession is under attack. Corporations are now developing their own executive education programs. The move to online education means that whatever teaching requirements we retain can be met by fewer people, so the profession is likely significantly over-capacity. The public – which includes both users and funders of academic research – doesn't recognize the value of research, both because it gets crowded out by practitioner studies that exploit their confirmation bias, and also because the petty fights we get into with each other give the impression that no one agrees and so there's nothing to learn from academia (see also Schoar, 2020). Of course, healthy dissent is to be encouraged if people reach different conclusions – but, each year, our profession pushes out the frontier of knowledge and we agree much more than we disagree. For example, the consensus from a broad stream of research is that share buybacks are much less value destructive than politicians and talking heads claim them to be – but academia is having very little impact on this debate and so unwarranted regulation is a real possibility.
If we don't stand up for our own profession or, worse, actively try to destroy it, we ourselves will lose in the long term. The schools of the future may be teaching schools. Indeed, such schools are already starting to crop up, with few research requirements aside from developing case studies. If research is irrelevant, why should students or donors pay for it?
Despite these threats, the scenario is far from a doomsday one. We have the power to help our colleagues create knowledge and to disseminate their research. Our time is a scarce resource, and we face our own creation and dissemination pressures. But the beauty of gifts of unequal value is that public goods can be created at little cost to ourselves – seemingly small actions make a big difference. The main barrier isn't so much time, but a mindset shift – from a zero-sum mentality to thinking proactively about how we can advance our profession.
One such gift is kindness. This doesn't mean telling white lies – if we're asked to discuss a paper with serious flaws, it's our duty to point them out. Not to do so is unkind to the authors, otherwise they send a flawed paper to a journal, as well as being a disservice to the conference. But even harsh criticisms can be given in a constructive way15 – yet sometimes the discussant thinks he can boost his reputation by slamming the (usually junior) author, like a bully who beats up little kids in the school playground. And like in the playground, it's tempting to weigh in ourselves – to be the thermometer that reflects the temperature around us – but we have the power to be a thermostat and affect the temperature. In the Q&A following discussions that went overboard, I've seen audience members politely, but firmly, explain why the main criticism is invalid – to defend those unable to defend themselves.16
Other gifts of unequal value involve small acts of awareness. After a discussion, it's tempting to respond to at least the main criticism, but I've seen authors remark that the session is running late and forgo the opportunity to respond so other papers get their full time. Presenters and discussants have voluntarily shortened their own talks for the same reason. The effect of these actions goes far beyond providing a few extra minutes to the later papers. They change the temperature of a conference from being about marketing your own research to listening to others’. This then inspires the audience to think about how they can be a thermostat themselves.
Some acts of awareness involve talking to a conference attendee who's alone at a conference cocktail party. I don't want this to come across as an ‘adopt an introvert’ project, but to highlight how such awareness can have an outsized effect. During the second evening of the Utah Winter Finance conference, there's no scheduled dinner to allow professors to form their own groups. One group noticed I knew virtually no one as I was a PhD student. They kindly invited me to their dinner even though it meant they now had too many people for the car and we had to take a taxi. When the bill came, a professor remarked that I won't have a research budget and should pay less than everyone else.
In the third summer of my PhD, I was grateful to be invited to the NBER Summer Institute. I was at the dinner the evening before the conference. A social psychologist studying human behavior would have a field day at NBER dinners. When it's time to move from the drinks to the dinner, no one sits down. They wait for the big shots to seat themselves first and then they rush to sit at the same table. Then, when you're at the table, you hang on their every word and laugh as audibly as you can at their attempted jokes.
There was an assistant professor at my table. She should have talked to everyone else at the table instead of a PhD student; she wasn't even sitting next to me so had no obligation to do so. Yet she struck up a lengthy conversation, showed genuine interest in my research, and looked at my website after the conference and dropped me a note saying she found my capital structure paper interesting (at the time, it had ‘limits to arbitrage’ in the title). This was Wei Jiang, and we ended up writing two papers together, one on limits to arbitrage. At the time, she couldn't have calculated that there'd be any instrumental benefit to such a conversation. But, at the risk of repeating myself yet again, actions taken for intrinsic reasons might end up benefiting us unexpectedly.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/fima.12387
