Background and Motivation

In collaborations such as doing research work and writing a paper together, often the relative contribution from each team members determines the order of authors of the paper. We call this the authorship/credit allocation problem. Ideally, one should have a system to record constributions from all members at each step and also have a metric to evaluate the contributions for this problem. However, in reality, there is no such explicit system and it often relies very much on each member's memory of the contribution records.

Previous reseach already found that people intend to exaggerate/overestimate his/her own contribution when the group effort leads to something good (and likely to under estiamte when it leads to something bad)^[1]. In perticular, ^[2] examined this phenomenon on authorship allocation and found that overall the total estimated contribution, which is the sum of the relative contribution (in percentage) of each member estimated by each author him/herself, is larger than [math]\displaystyle{ 100\% }[/math].

This is rather an serious issue. First of all, it will be good for scientometric sttudies to have a truthful author list, which more or less descibe the true contributions from the authors. And more importantly, if one believes that his/her constribution is not properly recognized in the author list, he/she might stop further even more fruitful/needed collaboration.

So, can we have a tool to help all collaborators to get more satisfied (by each member or at least by majority) authorship allocation, without needing the above tool of recording and evaluating contributions?

BTW, the tool of recording and evaluating contributions is, of course, also a project that should be implemented by our scientometric people.

Another motivation is from the studies of game theory, the Ultimatum game and the public goods game in perticular. In the ultimatum game, two players need to determine how to allocate a given amount of money. The first player suggests the plan, say how much will be given to the second player, while the second player decide either to accept or reject the offer. If accepted, the allocation will be done as suggested. If rejected, neither player gets any money. In a public goods game, each player is given initially the same amount of money ([math]\displaystyle{ d }[/math]) and then each player decide how much ([math]\displaystyle{ v_{i}\lt d }[/math]) out of this initial amount will be invested in the public goods. The invested money will be rewarded with a constant rate [math]\displaystyle{ R\lt math\gt and in the end, each player will get an even part of the reward so that a the end \lt math\gt E^{i}=d-v_{i}+\frac{R}{N}\left(\sum_{i=1}^{N}v_{i}\right) }[/math].

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