The Monkey Cage

Tyler Cowen picks up on the ‘technical note’ in Andrew’s zombie paper.

We originally wrote this article in Word, but then we converted it to Latex to make it look more like science.

This is, of course, strongly reminiscent of the advice that Andrew’s sometime co-author, Gary King, gives to graduate students

Prepare this paper as if it were to be submitted for formal review at a professional journal. Go to the reading room in the library or JStor and have a look for examples. (Why? Quality may be everything, but it is hard to measure and so style provides important signals. For example, as a purely predictive matter, papers formatted with LATEX are much less likely to contain egregious methodological flaws. Use this to your advantage.)

The problem being, of course that if King’s advice becomes generally well known, it is likely to undermine itself. From personal experience, I can testify that it is a lot easier to learn LaTeX than serious quantitative techniques. Hence LaTeX may be an “important signal” but it is one that is relatively cheap and only weakly correlated with technical ability. Those of you who have to write game theoretic questions for comprehensive exams may possibly find it entertaining to turn King’s piece of advice into a signalling game and get students to figure out the separating and pooling equilibria under different sets of plausible parameters. It would surely get the point across to students in a more amusing way than all of those nuclear crisis scenarios from Schelling.

And while we are on the topic of sometime co-authors - is Andrew’s ‘claim’ to have written this with George A. Romero a bid to become the person who has the highest combination Erdos-Kevin Bacon number? Or are there people out there with higher (I don’t know what Andrew’s Erdos number is, but I am presuming it is decent-high)? It would be even better, of course, iif Romero somehow came across this paper and agreed to actually become a co-author …