Why Scientists Should Not Show and Tell

Are scientists incentivized to share intermediate results? Some recent work has argued that credit-maximizing scientists would share intermediate results, whereas other work has argued that sharing too much too quickly can hinder a community’s achievement of epistemic goals. This suggests a tradeoff between scientists’ credit-based self-interest and what is epistemically best. We make this tradeoff explicit in an agent-based NK landscape model, where credit-maximizing scientists face a prisoner’s dilemma due to collective epistemic and credit benefits from withholding. Multiple coders independently implemented the model, leading us to identify several coding errors. We reflect on this code comparison experience.