Pitfalls of digital scholarship: Machiavelli and Matching

 One of the alluring features of the digitization of texts is that they can be searched, their citations can be examined and cross-referenced, and facts about texts, and the literatures that they comprise, can be detected.  But of course,  digital searches can also lead you astray.

Something like that may have happened in this study of business ethics. (Relax, this isn't a blog post about questionable ethics in science.)  

Maity, M., Roy, N., Majumder, D. et al. Revisiting the Received Image of Machiavelli in Business Ethics Through a Close Reading of The Prince and Discourses. J Bus Ethics (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-023-05481-2

The authors of the above paper searched in journals related to business and economics, for papers  about Niccolò Machiavelli, the 16th century author of The Prince, whose name has entered into the language to describe the kind of advice he gave: Machiavellian.

Looking at the most highly cited papers, and their network of co-citations (i.e. citations of each other) they find three clusters in the Machiavelli literature. They note that two of the clusters include many citations from one to the other, but that the third cluster (in green) is not connected to the other two.  The third cluster they label "matching problems in markets." (In fairness, the authors of the paper note this separation, and concentrate their analysis on the first two clusters.)

Here are the papers in the clusters. The papers in cluster 3 will be familiar to many readers of this blog.

Here in larger font is cluster 3, of papers on "Matching problems in markets": Abdulkadiroǧlu et al. (2003), Abdulkadiroǧlu and Sönmez (2003), Dubins and Freedman, (1981), Gale and Shapley (1962), Gale and Sotomayor (1985a), Gale and Sotomayor (1985b), Kojima and Pathak (2009), Roth (1982, 1984a, 1984b, 1985, 2002), Roth and Sotomayor (1990), Roth and Peranson (1999).

This cluster indeed contains well cited papers that cite one another. Yet I'm pretty sure that none of them cite Machiavelli, nor would most readers think that they connect to The Prince.

This latter cluster was almost surely included because of the titles of two of the included papers, neither of which in fact cites Machiavelli. (His name made it into the titles in a sort of jokey way, having to do with the fact that players in matching games may sometimes profit from behaving unstraightforwardly.) They are:

Dubins, Lester E., and David A. Freedman. "Machiavelli and the Gale-Shapley algorithm." The American Mathematical Monthly 88, no. 7 (1981): 485-494.

and

Gale, David, and Marilda Sotomayor. "Ms. Machiavelli and the stable matching problem." The American Mathematical Monthly 92, no. 4 (1985): 261-268.

But Machiavelli might be proud to be included in an economic literature on incentives.