Perception of Inequality and the authorship problem

An Interdisciplinary Project struggling to find its Place in two different Disciplines

Hey NetPLACE readers!

The last seminar on the 21st of April was amazing! The two speakers, Jan Schulz and Daniel Mayerhoffer from the University of Bamberg in Germany, proposed a network-based explanation of perceived inequality.

They have shown analytically the implications of homophilic graph formation: individuals perceive themselves to be in the middle of the income distribution independently of their actual position (middle-class bias) (check related paper in Social Networks or the arXiv postprint). In their second project, they have taken into account perceptions of gender and racial wage gaps. It turned out that the combination of homophilic graph-formation and locally limited estimation is able to replicate both the underestimation of gender and racial wage gap. This is in line with the finding that the adversely affected part of the population is more interested in global information about the issue.

These projects testify to an interdisciplinary nature; Jan and Daniel, in fact, come respectively from a department of Economics and one of Political Science. This has been both a blessing and an obstacle at the same time: it was very difficult to present their works to experts in the two different fields without damaging the individual profiles of the authors.

Jan and Daniel were incredibly coordinated in giving the talk (check the video on the Youtube channel and the slides, everything was explained with LEGO!), although communication during the work stages of the project was not so easy: this often happens when there are many people working on the same project and the tasks are not well distributed.

Another problem with projects involving many people is how to choose the order of the authors; Jan and Daniel decided to choose depending on the type of Journal: Jan was the first in economics journals and Daniel in political science. But this is not always the case: often, people working on the same project have not contributed in the same way to it. So, what is the best to do for handling these situations?

During the discussion, we proposed a practical scheme that tries to give a quantitative answer to this question. How would you solve the authorship problem? Do you know any other resources that can help us in this situation?

Feel free to share your ideas on the slack channel!