Computational Social Philosophy Seminars (CSPS) is a regular international online seminar series, focusing on research that uses or engages with the use of computational tools to address questions in social philosophy.
All seminars are on Mondays at 8:30am PT / 11:30am ET / 4:30pm London / 5:30pm Berlin.
Date: November 10, 2025
Speaker: Kevin Zollman
Title: Authorship norms and epistemic public goods
Abstract: Different academic fields have different norms about how authors are listed in published papers. Some norms are insensitive to the contribution of the authors, listing them in alphabetical order or by seniority. Other norms represent the relative contributions of the authors by listing those who contributed the most first. In this paper, we develop a game theoretic model to explore the conditions under which these norms evolve and the consequences they have for collaboration. We find surprising conclusions about how the distribution of expected contribution affects the evolution of these norms. In addition, we find that all norms result in some inefficiency: they discourage some productive collaboration. Different norms discourage different types of collaboration. We explore what might be the epistemic consequence of these differences.
For a complete list of past and upcoming seminar presentations see the Talks page.
The seminars are held on Zoom and last 60 minutes. Our seminars will typically have one of the following formats
Format 1: 30 min presentation + 30 min discussion
Format 2: two flash talks, 15 min presentation + 15 min discussion each
Sina Fazelpour (Northeastern), Sahar Heydari Fard (Ohio State University), Hannah Rubin (University of Missouri), Dunja Šešelja (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Rory Smead (Northeastern), Jingyi Wu (London School of Economics)
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