Being able to replicate scientific findings is crucial for scientific progress. A paper⁽¹⁾ published this week in Nature Human Behaviour provides details on a new analysis to quantify the replicability of social science experiments published in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015. You can find a discussion here, here or here.

Very interestingly, authors highlight in the abstract:

we find that peer beliefs of replicability are strongly related to replicability, suggesting that the research community could predict which results would replicate and that failures to replicate were not the result of chance alone.

Which means prediction markets works in this arena and could help social scientists to decide, for example, which classic studies to focus on replicating, given limited time or resources. Furthermore, it shows that there are clues to the strength of the evidence in the papers themselves!!

Yes, gambling can save science.

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(1) Camerer, Colin F., et al. ‘Evaluating the Replicability of Social Science Experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015’. Nature Human Behaviour, Aug. 2018, p. 1. http://www.nature.com, doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0399-z.