THE WINNER’S CURSE.

THE WINNER’S CURSE. The Winner’s Curse is an economic theory developed first in the oil industry. This article, applying the theory to bidding for baseball free agents, gives a good history of the first publication on the theory. The theory says that if there are a lot of people bidding for an oil lease or a baseball free agent, and you win the bid, it may very well be that you won because you made a mistake and bid too high. The application to the publication of scientific articles is straightforward. As the article in the Economist puts it, “With so many scientific papers chasing so few pages in the most prestigious journals, the winners could be the ones most likely to oversell themselves—to trumpet dramatic or important results that later turn out to be false.”