Researcher Incentives and Empirical Methods

Abstract

The notion of incentives is a concept rarely undermined in the context of economics because this plays no small part in explaining behavior: the occurrences of a certain act or behavior would rise if the returns attributed to this act would rise as well. It is believed that presenting the right incentives would bring out the best results and behaviors from human beings. However, economic models are intended to not account for the individual selflessness of those who come up with said models. Although there exists a small collection of literature that would assert otherwise and which investigates how researcher initiative affects statistical results, the only significant impact is the uncertainty regarding the significance of the results. In this chapter, ten points are introduced regarding issues of researcher incentives and statistical analysis that focus on how researcher initiative should be accepted as a norm.