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.