What on earth are economic theorists like me trying to accomplish? The paper discusses four dilemmas encountered by an economic theorist: i) the dilemma of absurd conclusions: should we abandon a model if it produces absurd conclusions or should we regard a model as a very limited set of...

Scientific fraud is a pervasive phenomenon with deleterious consequences, as it leads to false scientific knowledge being published, therefore affecting major individual and public decisions. In this paper we build a game-theoretic model of the research and publication process that analyzes why...