As some econ researchers move toward a lab model, norms need to be updated. e.g. coauthor thresholds, author order.

Should we just copy the sciences' model? If you were designing a system from scratch, what would it look like?

The new large-team research model is not consistent with the current small-n-authors-in-alphabetical-order reward structure.

Long-term RAs should be coauthors, but as long as scientific careers depend on publications, there also needs to be a signal of who is driving the study.

As far as I can tell, the sciences model is: the first author did all the work, the last author runs the lab, everyone in between was copied on at least one email and signed the conflict of interest statement.

It's not obvious we should just carbon copy this in econ.

The science model has its own horror stories. e.g. 1. Colleagues willing to read over a junior scholar's paper and provide feedback only if they are made a coauthor.

2. Evaluating scholars' careers by actually reading the work instead of counting publications is a lot harder when there are 200 publications (like in the sciences) vs. 10 as in econ.

3. In the sciences, once a paper has a lead author, all other authors' incentives quickly head toward zero. The econ "no-author-order" approach is much better for collaboration. (albeit with some cost to the lexicographically challenged)

Econs working in teams will need to abandon the "all-authors-equal-alphabetical" model, but we should be thoughtful and design a better system.

Author order alone is not informative enough. We could signal author types with emojis. For instance:

Core designers/executors
Core RAs
Funding or data provider
Placebo coauthor left on just to be nice

Author order can be random within groups.

I'm sure people have better / more creative ideas.

What would the ideal system look like? I'm sure it wouldn't look like the sciences!

@glenweyl I feel like you may have written about this, or maybe it was just about refereeing.