Essays on the Organization and Production of Knowledge

Kurtis Hingl

Advisor: Peter J Boettke, PhD, Department of Economics

Committee Members: Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, Jonathan Schulz

Buchanan Hall, #D180
April 29, 2026, 12:00 PM to 02:00 PM

Abstract:

This dissertation explores the organization and production of knowledge.

The first chapter proposes a tradeoff between prestige and testability in evaluating scientific research: intuitively, the easier a scientific claim is to test, the less evaluators must rely on the researcher's prestige as a proxy for quality. I ground this in a simple reputation model and show that prestige and testability are substitutes in consumption but complements in production. I present two kinds of supporting evidence. Firstly, using the corpus of bibliographic data from 1900-2015, I find a negative association between testability and the concentration of prestige markers across scientific fields (and subfields within those fields)—at scale, the consumer-side substitution effect dominates. Secondly, I look at a case study of a within-field shift toward more testability: the "credibility revolution" in economics. Credible methods are championed by high-prestige authors, nodding to complementarity in production between prestige and testability; however, I also find that the reception of credible-methods papers exceeds what author prestige alone would predict, lending evidence that the consumer-side substitution effect persists even at the micro-level.

The second chapter presents a number of stylized facts on the social structure of scientific fields in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I use a large corpus of publications to explore the evolution of relational, geographic, and demographic features of scientists across fields and subfields, including within-field citation shares, citation clustering, coauthor clustering, coauthor geographic distance, gender shares, one-and-done author shares, prevalence of social media promotion, and academic age. For expository purposes, I present trends and correlations using a measure of testability developed in the first chapter.

The third chapter, coauthored with Marcus Shera and published in the Journal of Institutional Economics, develops a theory of when and how "ideas" are used for social coordination where institutions are incomplete. We build on the tradition of institutions as rules-in-equilibrium and argue that all sufficiently complex institutions are incomplete with respect to possible situations they are tasked with coordinating. In these awkward moments, coordination around uncodified "ideas" is necessary for institutional continuity. This theory builds the requisite room for ideas to have independent explanatory power in discussions of economic development, economic history, and political economy.