Modeling herding behavior and its risks

Abstract

Scientific communities can exhibit herding behavior when their members are reluctant to take research risks. This paper examines the epistemic consequences of herding behavior, as well as its surprising robustness. One way that herding behavior can be damped is by incentivizing research risks along the lines of recently announced National Science Foundation initiatives. Our models show that such incentives can have a small, but nevertheless significant impact on a scientific community's epistemic progress.

Keywords:

• cognitive labor
• herding
• agent-based model

Notes

1. A wide range of philosophers including Giere (1988), Hull (1988), Solomon (1992), Kitcher (1993) and Thagard (1993) have emphasized that science involves the coordinated cognitive effort of many scientists. Closer to the aims of this paper is Solomon's (2001) work on social empiricism, which argues that normative scientific epistemology requires the assessment of internal as well as social factors. Sociologists of science have also discussed this issue, but their primary focus has tended to be the incentive structure of science (e.g. Merton, 1957) or the ways in which scientists navigate the complex relationships created by the division of research labor (e.g. Gerson 2008).