ProMarket interviews Magali Eben and Giorgio Monti about changes to the disclosure policy of the the Academic Society for Competition Law (ASCOLA) and the broader conversation on conflicts of interest in antitrust and competition scholarship.
The Academic Society for Competition Law (ASCOLA), the largest international organization for competition law scholars, recently published an update to its 2018 disclosure policy. ASCOLA has been at the forefront of establishing guiding principles of ethics for the academic competition community. ProMarket managing editor Andy Shi interviews professors Magali Eben and Giorgio Monti (committee chair), who were part of the ASCOLA committee that drafted the updated disclosure policy. They discuss the reasons for the update and broader conversations about disclosures and conflicts of interest in the antitrust and competition field at a time when concerns about industry capture of academic scholarship have been growing.
Andy Shi
Let’s start with disclosures [at Magali Eben’s suggestion]. I’ll go first since I’m talking. I’m the editor of ProMarket. Disclosures of conflicts of interest is a topic of interest for much of the Stigler Center [ProMarket’s home institution]. That includes my boss, Luigi Zingales, who recently published a working paper on the issue along with several other Stigler Center affiliates. That is to say, his views may filter into this conversation. ProMarket and the Stigler Center receive our funding from the [University of Chicago Booth] Business School, with occasional grants from organizations like the Knight Foundation. Otherwise, nothing to disclose.
Magali Eben
Okay, great. I’m Magali Eben. I’m a senior lecturer in competition law at the University of Glasgow, and that includes being deputy director of CREATe, which is the Center for Regulation of the Creative Economy. CREATe receives funding from public bodies, including UK AHRC and the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. In addition, it also gets funding for specific projects that can come from specific funding sources, mostly organizations of libraries, creators, museums, and creative industry participants.
The CREATe website lists for every single project specific sources of funding.
Giorgio Monti
I’m Giorgio Monti, professor of competition at Tilburg University. I’m also a research fellow at the Center for Regulation in Europe. The Center is a think tank which is funded by a number of public and private organizations, and for each project we list the funders and the sponsors, and we have an independence policy that we give to sponsors before they sign up for funding.
I also receive the occasional private funding from a variety of firms that ask for legal opinions.
Shi
Great. Okay, I think we’ve now covered our bases, and I’ll jump it to the first question. ASCOLA has updated its disclosure policy for the first time in seven years in response to new views on how conflicts of interest can skew trust in competition research. What have you found to be the core forces that have changed how we view conflicts of interest since 2018?
Eben
I think this has always been of interest, but the issue has gotten bigger, because there is more funded research, and there is generally more awareness of potential for bias and concerns about policy. I don’t think our text fundamentally changes the expectations we already had in 2018, but it is meant to give more guidance on how you disclose and in which circumstances. It is also meant to encourage our members to use some of their soft power to promote greater disclosure.
Monti
The declaration is about making sure members disclose. It’s not taking a normative stance that getting outside funding is bad. If there is a conflict of interest, you should just disclose it. The policy is not pejorative. You can still speak at ACSCOLA events, you can send your papers anywhere, provided there is a disclosure. This is the only rule that the declaration has. It’s an obligation to disclose, and what we’ve tried to do in the guidelines is to explain how that rule can be implemented in a variety of settings.
People normally disclose when they write a paper. People are normally able to disclose effectively when they present. But there are a number of other settings, such as giving interviews or their presence on social media, where we try to give guidelines about how to be fully transparent in all communication regarding their research.
The other thing that we try to do, and this is a little bit new in this version of the guidelines, is to create space for advocacy. That is to say, to encourage ASCOLA members, for example, to organize conferences themselves where they disclose. Or if they participate in an event to ask the event organizers, please, let’s have a disclose round before the papers begin.
We also want to speak to editors of journals and book publishers to tell them, look, it’s a good idea to have a disclosure policy, not just for the authors that you publish. We did a review of a range of journals in the field, and some have very sophisticated disclosure policies, some have nothing. But it is also for the editors to disclose among themselves and for referees to disclose any potential conflicts of interest. Again, ASCOLA cannot dictate what these editors do, but having compiled the practices we’ve seen in all the journals that specialize in competition law, the [ASCOLA] declaration provides a set of suggestions that editors might want to pick up. And then we also want to speak to research associations, whether these are universities, law schools, research centers, research institutes, whatever they are called, to suggest to them that they should have their own transparency and disclosure policies for their institution. Given that many of these institutions, centers, departments are populated by ASCOLA members, we hope that this way ASCOLA members can broaden the reach of the guidelines and make them stronger by implementing them in the institutions where it’s easier to have more robust regulations and easier to monitor compliance.
Shi
You bring up this point that I’ve struggled with a lot as an editor for ProMarket. We, too, require disclosures, but we never use them punitively. We never use them to ban people from writing for us. But as your positional paper discusses, especially in a citation of Barrios et al., conflicts of interest can reduce trust in research. One of Barrios et al.’s suggestions is that heavily conflicted research should be discounted when a scholar is up for academic promotion or for a tenure. It raises a question of whether there should be any kind of threshold or any point where conflicted research should be discounted so much that it is left out of consideration for a journal or ProMarket, where if it wasn’t conflicted, the argument would have been robust enough that we would have probably published it.
Maybe not in ASCOLA’s views, which has its official view, but in your personal views, do you think research can ever be conflicted enough that it should be discounted to the extent that is left out of publications or the speakers are left out of conferences?
Monti
My sense is that omitting something because it is funded is not smart. I think you can omit something if it is so badly written that it is clear that this is just advancing the line of a particular sponsor that is disclosed, but there is no counterpoint to an alternative view. Then one would just dismiss it on the basis of quality. In a way, you wouldn’t even need disclosure there. You just say the paper is bad in itself.
If there’s a paper that says monopolization rules should never be applied unless we are 99.9% certain that the behavior is harmful, which advances a particular position, even if that paper has no disclosure, you might suspect where this author is getting these ideas from.
I would distinguish between the merits and the funding. The disclosure should not affect the merits, and vice versa. It just allows the reader or the listener to make up their own mind as to whether they want to be involved in this or not.
The other thing is there is a lot of external funding out there. My view is we should encourage this. Universities in many jurisdictions are chronically underfunded. It is important for research that we get funding from somewhere. In the Netherlands, the fundraising I do goes to the university; it doesn’t go into my private bank account. It is necessary for the department to run for me to apply for external funding.
So to a certain extent, we need to encourage that. But we need to cushion it with disclosure rules to make sure people know that if something is funded that is something they can consider, and then they can make their own choices.
The other point I want to make is that there isn’t perhaps so much funding out there to make this a problem. I edit the journal Common Market Law Review. We don’t get so many papers that are clearly problematic, where there is a disclosure where we begin to worry. When we would worry is if these journals were overcrowded with papers, funded by private organizations, representing a particular position. Then you can get worried, and maybe in some disciplines that point has been reached. But I think until we’ve reached that threshold where there’s so much external funding, all coming from one direction, that we shouldn’t be using editorial policies to limit what we publish.
Eben
I think I agree with that. Discounting is something that we do personally, right? When I read an article in a journal or I listen to a presentation, I do heavily discount in my head when I have suspicions. Whether organizations and individuals choose to discount is up to them, and I think having general rules in a particular journal that we’re not going to accept papers because they’ve been funded is problematic, because I don’t think there is a solid measure for how much you discount, what kind of funding you discount, how you measure the discounting. Until you have a quantitative measure to do it, there is no way you can do it robustly and objectively. So even if you wanted to, it would be hard. As Giorgio said, we have to be pragmatic. We have to recognize the scarcity of public funding, and the benefits of external funding, like access to data. If there is a problem to be addressed, it’s the problem of access we have to data, why we rely on this type of funding. Unless you have a robust system in place, you can’t go discounting papers because they received funding. It’s just too difficult.
But you need to encourage transparency. That’s the main thing, and then people can make solid choices on whether or not they trust a particular outcome more or less based on where the funding comes from. That’s where we should start, because completely banning things that have been funded is starting at the end of a much, much longer process, and I’m not sure that end is even an end we want to achieve.
Shi
I’ll stay on the topic of Barrios et al.’s paper for a moment. In their research, they use vignettes of potentially conflicted papers. They send the vignettes to subject matter experts, they send them to the general public, in this case, Americans. One of the distinctions they find is that an expert in competition policy, for example, will discount less a conflicted paper in competition [economics] than, say, an expert in finance or monetary policy. This works in the opposite order, too. And the general American public will discount the paper more than both these groups of experts. The authors suggest that it’s because a colleague will have a hard time believing in the bias of their peer.
But one thing I want to run by you is that maybe the experts who are discounting less potentially conflicted research in their field are rather somewhat blinded by the fact that they believe they have a better sense of the validity of an argument despite the potential conflict of interest. And so the question I want to run by you is do you think, as competition policy experts, we rightly or wrongly believe we’re better placed to overcome potential conflicts of interests in the research of our expertise? And maybe this is a good thing because we are better able to look at the merits of the paper and thus we can publish more legitimate work. Or do you think we are overlooking something here? Are we more vulnerable to letting conflicted papers slip through our sieves because we are confident and believe we are better placed to judge the merits of the paper research?
Eben
This is not an easy question. The Barrios et al. paper is really interesting. I don’t think it’s enough right now. We need more studies on discounting in order to come to clear conclusions on why people discount or how they discount. It’s a very good paper to start the discussion, so I’m glad it’s there. But I’m not sure it’s very easy to come to a conclusion on this, especially because anecdotally, I’m not sure that this is how I personally work when I discount.
Yes, there might be something where you think as a subject expert, you are more likely to be able to catch flaws. But in fact, I think I am more suspicious when it comes to my own fields than when it comes to other fields, because I have a better sense, or I believe I have a better sense, of what’s going on. Particularly, I am more suspicious when there is a lack of transparency, and I suspect there has been a conflict of interest. When I think an author has not declared funding, I am more likely to know that there might have been funding because it’s in my field and I know a little bit more of the background information. So if the author doesn’t declare funding or material support, then I am more likely to suspect that there was material support. And that’ll make me more likely to delve into the resources, the data, try to assess the evidence they use, and I feel like I’m in a better position to assess the evidence they use because it’s my field.
Whereas if it’s a completely different area of policy, let’s say health policy, even if I wanted to go assess the evidence with a suspicious mind, I would not be in as good of a position to do it because it is not my area. It might even, for me personally, be the opposite of what they found. It’s a really great paper. I just think we need more about it to actually come to an answer of why do subject experts discount or not discount?
Monti
I agree. It’s a really interesting finding, but this is the part of the paper where more work needs to be done, because the paper does some nice empirics, but as to why, we can all speculate. So when I listen to your question, the other speculations one might have are twofold. One, if you know the author personally, you might discount less, because you say, yes, he’s being funded by corporation X, but look at his work. It’s always very fair, and he never gives way to the views of the funder. He’s always independent, and today he might take a view more pro-enforcement. Or he might say, this decision by the new Commission is completely wrong.
The other thing is if the piece is refereed, you might trust the referee process, and you might say, well, the pieces pass through review. If it’s an economics paper, I know the review. It’s a lot more intensive than it is for a law paper. So you might say, surely people have looked at this already and there’s a bit of a certification if it’s in the American Economic Review. I know I can trust that the findings are robust, and then, of course, if that’s not going to settle the question I can also double check myself because it’s in my field.
So one can speculate. But the other issue I want to raise is one thing we don’t explore, which is why people discount conflicted research. External funding is pervasive. The answer cannot be, let’s not have any external funding. The point is, if we have more transparency and more honesty about this, it will create a lot of virtuous effects. In the Netherlands, for example, [the regulatory framework] for academic research [provides that] you must always exercise your complete independence. Even if the findings are not in line with what the funder would like, you must continue to publish your work. By creating a culture where disclosure is embedded in a culture of independence, then the discount might even go away, right? Maybe the fact that we have a conflict of interest discount is not just because there is a conflict of interest, but because there’s a lack of safeguards on how the author then uses this funding in order to produce the research. So just having a conflict of interest, it shouldn’t be seen as a pejorative element to research. It should just be an indicator that there’s a risk. I think the former assistant attorney general put it nicely: “Economists believe in the sentence ‘If there is money on the table to take a position, you’ll take the position.’” The question is, how do you remove that risk, that perception, that funding leads to a particular outcome? The safeguards need to be richer than just disclosure.
Shi
I think you’re referring to Jonathan Kanter, the former United States assistant attorney general.
Monti
Yeah, I think it was.
Shi
Which leads me to my next question. The Stigler Center recently released a video where officials, both in the U.S. and Europe, are talking about the issue of academic capture, where some research in universities has become perceived as advocating on behalf of the funders, who are private corporations. In your personal experiences, have you found many government officials who have, in fact, been trusting academics less because of this?
Monti
This is not something I can comment on scientifically, but just anecdotally. My sense from the officials that I speak to is that they know who to trust and who not to trust. So they know if academic X is the mouthpiece for company A, they’re going get what company A wants, and it’s a guaranteed result. Other academics are more reliable because they are more independent. Again, I speak with a very limited sample of officials.
Eben
This also varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The relationships between academics and government officials aren’t monolithic. They’re not the same across the whole world. ASCOLA is a global organization. In the responses we got [asking about disclosure policies; see the appendix of the ASCOLA positional paper], we did see variations from one jurisdiction to another. I want to put on the record that we can’t pretend that the problem is entirely identical across the board, across the whole world.
Shi
Speaking of which, in your positional paper you interview experts from around the world about how disclosures are implemented or how policies regarding conflicts of interest are implemented. Overall, though different institutions may have different guidelines on how to make these conflicts transparent, do you think that at least most officials and most academics operating across different jurisdictions have the same or similar ideas of what constitutes a conflict of interest? Or are the definitions really all over the place?
Monti
Even before you get to the definitions, what struck me when I got the responses in the questionnaire was that very few jurisdictions have disclosure rules at all. Even when they do, they’re very, very general, without really going into what it is that should be disclosed, and why. With a number of jurisdictions, we’re still at the very early stages of this domain of disclosures. I think one respondent even said that, for that country, it was more the risk of corruption, rather than the risk of perverted research outcomes, that was utmost in the mind of the institution governing the rules on external funding. This is a totally different thing.
Which just goes to show Magali’s point that there’s such a diversity of understanding of this issue, because it has to do with the academic culture, it has to do with the sources of funding that are available in the country, it has to do with the way the profession has emerged and developed, which is very different across jurisdictions. Economists are really an exception, they operate across countries, but most academics tend to stick too one jurisdiction in law, because there’s very much a legal culture in which you’re born into, and then you become a lawyer or specialize in that jurisdiction. And so there’s very little cross-fertilization, which means that each one develops uniquely.
Now, when you look at those that do more work on conflicts of interest, then I think there is generally an understanding of what that means. So take the United States, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom. That’s three jurisdictions which have had a lot of experience in external funding and who know the risks, the ways in which this risk is identified, and what is a conflict of interest. Or maybe they don’t speak about it [using the term] conflict of interest, but we know what we’re talking about. We’re talking about external funding, which may pose a risk to the integrity of the outcome, and then safeguards are put in place. Once the problem is identified, the solutions in the jurisdictions we’ve covered are still fairly comparable.
If I can just advertise: if anyone reading this would like to send me knowledge of [the disclosure rules of] their institution or their jurisdiction, we try to serve as many people as possible, and not everybody responded. Of course, people are very busy. But that part of the position paper is very much a working in progress, so I really welcome fattening the file and having more information, because that will allow us to draw out better policies and better conclusions.
Shi
I want to return to something we’ve mentioned a few times, and that’s the fact that universities, they need external funding, universities are starved for funding for research. The fact is that either it comes from private corporations or philanthropists or governments. Something you mentioned in your positional paper, and I believe it’s citing the work on academic capture by Ioannis Lianos, is that all this funding, especially when it comes from private corporations, pushes research in a specific direction. So presumably, we’re focusing disproportionately on certain topics within competition policy and antitrust because it’s what the funders are interested in. Have you found that there are specific subjects that competition scholars are overly focusing on, and are there subjects that we’re neglecting because the funding just isn’t very interested in those specific topics?
Monti
Again, not scientifically, but just my impression: the first thing is a lot of funding tries to say, agencies should do better by spending more and more money before issuing a decision. This is what I call raising agencies’ costs. In the economic literature its raising rivals’ costs, and I think here what the lobbying is [doing is asking] to use more economics in order to get the right result. Sounds benevolent, but actually this incapacitates the work of agencies, because the more data points that are necessary before you find an infringement, the more complicated it is to run cases. You reduce the number of cases. So this idea that overenforcement is bad is something which is very easy for certain corporate organizations to push as an agenda item, because it serves a deregulation function.
Related to that, anything about excess regulation is funded, but not how to regulate better. What is not externally funded is work about improving the regulatory framework. Nobody can say that any jurisdiction regulates optimally. Regulatory failure is pervasive, so nobody’s going to argue about that. But the response to regulatory failure cannot be, let’s not regulate. It has to be, let’s regulate better. Digital market work has been funded extensively, but mostly it’s about trying to demonstrate that [regulation] is bad, or that there’s no competition problem at all, that firms are competing even though we all know there are monopolies.
And so there’s much less funding to promote the opportunities that competitive markets can generate. And of course, this research is much more difficult to deliver because when you open a market to competition, there’s a lot of uncertainty about how the market will develop and a lot of uncertainty about if new firm entrance will be successful, will the incumbent thwart us, and so on and so forth. If you think about the opening up of telecom markets, for example, it’s not as if from one day to the next, everybody has a different mobile phone provider. With opening up digital markets, choosing browsers, you need to educate people: what a browser is, choosing search engines, et cetera. To some extent, for the success of an enforcer’s policy, it is much more difficult to establish a measure because it takes a lot much longer time. Whereas any kind of legal uncertainty is picked off. I think corporate organizations that prefer less enforcement would push research in the areas that demonstrate the weaknesses of enforcement or the need to spend more money to enforce before one does.
Eben
As you were talking, it made me think also in a way how external private funding might push public funding in a particular direction, because if you have loads of research on why regulation is bad for innovation, for example, then you kind of push for the opposite argument to have to be done. Which is not necessarily on the area of research that is most interesting to public interest, but actually [is done] to respond to that narrow segment of research. I think it also has an impact on where public funding goes. Now, this is just my feeling, I don’t have any data to back that up. It’s just an intuition. I think that it’s quite a complicated question. There are priorities behind public funding. That means that not all research is going to be catered for by public funding. So having private funding can be helpful to cater to those areas of research that aren’t being funded.
The question is, whether that is happening or not. We focus a lot on Big Tech companies’ funding or tobacco companies’ funding or the telecoms companies’ funding. My experience with my own research center is that there are certain questions that aren’t publicly funded, but there are charities that are interested in it. We work a lot with creative industries, [we can work] with libraries’ associations or charities set up by big companies that will then use the money to ask, you know, can you look at this really niche question in this particular area related to museums and public access to culture. Those are also [instances of] private funding, that’s also external, and my feeling is that that is not looked at as skeptically, right? We need to have a bit of a broader conversation about that as well. It’s probably not looked at as skeptically because nobody cares about it as much. I do. I care about it. But this is also a question: that interaction between what the public purse funds and doesn’t fund and how that responds to what private funding does and doesn’t fund. So it’s more complicated. Sorry, I’ve added complexity to your question, but I do think we need to have a much broader conversation about this.
Shi
Oh, that’s alright, we love complexity. It keeps me employed. And that’s a really interesting point that there are these countervailing forces that pushes the funding towards a certain equilibrium. Maybe the markets are more efficient than we all thought they were.
So, we’re concerned overall about bias in academic research. So far, we’ve focused predominantly on disclosures. But Barrio et al., for example, recommend discounting conflicted research during academic promotion or tenure review. Lianos has a really interesting idea of trying to distribute private funding more equitably across different research projects to make sure that all topics are getting their just deserts and there is what he calls epistemological diversity. Are there other mechanisms that you have in mind for protecting academic research and institutions against potential biases beyond disclosures and these ideas from Lianos and Barrios et al.?
Monti
Ioannis [Lianos]’ idea: of course it’s laudable to say, okay, if these guys are the ones that are funding the research, they should create a comparable fund that funds research in the other direction. It’s a bit difficult to administer, but it’s still a way of thinking about it. But even publicly funded bodies will have their own biases. We can all complain about not having won a particular grant because we feel the funding favors, a particular genre of research as opposed to another. So as lawyers, for example, when we compete for public funds with other academics, we are often on the losing side, because most of the lawyers’ work is to read cases and come up with some sort of interpretation as to what the law is. It’s much more stimulating for the people reviewing funding applications to read a funding application that is more methodologically intriguing and complicated than just somebody saying, I need to sit down in the library in silence for many, many hours in order to digest several cases, which are very, very complicated.
My general point is, we just need to improve public funding. In the Netherlands, we’re currently having severe budget cuts. Many jurisdictions are facing similar issues, and I think there’s just a lack of attention on the importance of independent research. And I think, when I joined academia in the early 1990s, the point was, you take a salary cut [compared to private practice], but you’re free to do the research you want. Now you take a salary cut, you teach twice as much, and then you have to apply for extra funding if you want to do any research. And then that also limits a little bit the epistemological diversity [of research], because you just don’t have the time to do as much research as you would like. Promotion criteria is such that you’re forced to specialize. Each one of us is now much more narrowly focused in a particular stream of research than we were many, many years ago. So there are a lot of factors that in the evolution of universities that I have seen that have an adverse impact on [epistemological] diversity.
Eben
I agree. We need to fix the public funding system. I mean, this is not just funding, also data access. Why do we turn to external funders? Well, because we need to bring in more money for a variety of reasons, but also because we want access to the data. In the EU, the Digital Services Act tried to establish a system of access to data whereby researchers can request the internal data of very large [digital] platforms and search engines to research systemic risks. This is new, and I’m interested to see exactly how it works and what the notable impact will be on research in Europe. But I think it’s both funding and access to data. I mean, I had a conversation at some point with an enforcer who was complaining about the fact that they weren’t sure about how academics are funded, and I said, okay, but then it’s your job if you think it’s a problem. It’s your job to advocate for more funding for research. If you genuinely think it impacts public services, the enforcement of law, then it is your job as someone who represents the public interest to make a case that the public interest requires public funding for research. We can’t just sit here and complain about the external funding. We need to actively do something about it. Lianos’ suggestion of matching funding is interesting, but pragmatically, that’s not going to save us, right? You need to think a lot more large scale and you need a lot more courage at the public level to fix what is to some extent a failing system. Which is not a very hopeful message, but I think this is where we really should be looking.
Shi
Yes, good luck to us all. I have one last question. I’ve found that over the last few years at ProMarket that the culture of disclosure has certainly improved, where people are much more willing and forthcoming about what they disclose. So, I agree with the comments in your positional paper that people’s views are changing. And I think for the better. But as you also point out, there is a lot of disagreement about what constitutes a conflict of interest, what should be disclosed, and what is maybe irrelevant. How do you think we as a community should continue to improve upon our disclosures?
Monti
This is a difficult question. I recently listened to a person presenting a paper, and what he did—and I just want to signal this as good practice that I never thought about —he talked about a lot of cases, and every time he raised a case where he had participated, he disclosed before moving on to discuss it, so that the disclosure was embedded in the presentation. It wasn’t just at the beginning. And I thought that was really helpful because then you could say, “Okay, he’s giving me the data that he used. But he’s also telling me, honestly, that he worked for one of the two sides before giving me the data so I could make up my own mind.” And I think this was really smooth because it didn’t slow down the presentation, it didn’t eat into time.
One of the other concerns that we had when we were discussing this [ASCOLA] disclosure policy is this: at the ASCOLA conference, which we just had [in June], we had so many presentations and so little time. You ask everybody for disclosures and it’s about five minutes of disclosing. You’re going to eat into the conference time, which is not an unreasonable point to make. You want to hear the substance, not the disclosure. We need to find ways of facilitating an effective way of communicating how we disclose. I think we’re not there yet. I think everyone has their own style, but maybe we could learn a little bit more about how to do this better, just to make sure things are communicated efficiently. And partly this is the job of ASCOLA, but it’s also the job of journals. For example, when [the journals] have a disclosure policy to make sure there’s some standardization so everybody knows exactly what is expected, and everybody’s treated equal.
This is a learning process. I took the lead in drafting [the 2025 ASCOLA policy]. I felt the other [2018] version could be more concise, could give even shorter guidance, while leaving the author a lot of room to adapt to the particular circumstance rather than trying to be very prescriptive in ways that may not work in all contexts. So it’s both more principles-based and also giving the members more flexibility. Maybe the next step is, okay, now that we’ve got better down the principles, can we streamline disclosures in such a way that they’re more comparable?
Eben
We’re not at the start, but we’re still somewhere at the beginning of this. There’s an evolution, and part of this is talking about it more openly and, as I do think important to say, without animosity. Funding is part of our research environment and we should not pretend that it is not. As someone said in the general assembly of ASCOLA, you know, funding is not a crime. But let’s have transparency. This is important. The problem we can have is that when we are secret about our funding then suddenly everything is a little bit tainted. Ooh, has this been funded? Has this not been funded?
Whereas actually what we really need to do is talk about it. And so I make a point now of just chatting to people and going, “So anyway, this paper that we did was funded by these people. Who was your paper funded by?” And I just see what they come up with. The funny part is that then they usually start into a big rant. It’s a very loaded subject, but the more we talk about it, the less it will be a loaded subject. And then when it becomes less of a loaded subject, we can all share good practice. The ASCOLA attempt was also about creating more good practice, for individual researchers, for journals, for research centers, for organizations. One thing I am going to do is talk internally with my colleagues: “Is there something that you do that I don’t do?” That’s the bit. We need to talk candidly amongst each other and encourage each other to disclose and learn from each other. I don’t think we’re there yet, but maybe along the way.
Author Disclosure: The author reports no conflicts of interest. You can read our disclosure policy here.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
Subscribe here for ProMarket’s weekly newsletter, Special Interest, to stay up to date on ProMarket’s coverage of the political economy and other content from the Stigler Center.
