No 'I' in team...but there should be

Stan Liebowitz says, Economists, heal thy norms;

Zero proration is a flagrant violation of economic logic. For two identical quality articles, one written by a single author and the other written by four authors, should the credit to each of the four coauthors really be the same as the reward to the sole author? Do we normally say that efficient production requires that inputs get paid their marginal revenue product multiplied by the number of coworkers?

If the four-authored paper is not written with each author providing one-fourth or less effort compared to each author working alone, then that size of team is inefficient. But if each coauthor is given full credit, they have an incentive to coauthor even when the number of papers written by the four-author team is much lower than the number of equal quality papers they could write working alone or with smaller teams.

Departments that fail to discount by the number of coauthors should be embarrassed to use a measurement process that incorporates a logical error that would not be allowed in a micro principles course.

And Stan wrote this by himself.

Now, if he had a blog....