Benefitting from “Intellectual Arbitrage” in Research and Publishing
By Matthew Corritore
“We often think about “arbitrage” as a way to buy and sell goods or services for a profit. You might, for example, buy an antique at a garage sale from an owner who doesn’t appreciate its value, and sell it to a collector who does at a huge premium.
But during my early career as a business professor, I’ve come to appreciate that arbitrage is not just a way to capture economic value — academics can also use intellectual arbitrage to produce and publish novel research. By intellectual arbitrage, I mean leveraging an idea that one scientific community takes for granted, to produce an insight that another community might find particularly valuable and interesting.
"Know your audience!” Many gave me this advice during my doctoral studies as I struggled to design and communicate my research. While I understood the rationale behind making a focused contribution to a particular literature, I worried that this strategy would limit the innovativeness and impact of my work. We all strive to write that pathbreaking paper that launches a new branch of science and changes the way that people see the world, rather than settling for an incremental contribution to an existing body of work. Moreover, research on scientific innovation tells us that the most impactful papers often recombine ideas from disparate areas of knowledge in creative ways (Uzzi et al., 2013).
If you're lucky enough to discover something new by recombining ideas from different intellectual communities, shouldn’t your paper speak to multiple audiences? Or aim to create a new community of thought altogether?
I’ve learned that the answer is, in most cases, no. Why? Because, at least initially, members of one of those intellectual communities will perceive your idea as more novel and interesting than members of the other. Which is greater: the value that Audience A derives from learning about insights from Audience B, or the reverse? Writing your paper for the audience that will find your synthesis the most interesting will maximize your chances of getting published, and it’s only through publishing that your work can be discovered by multiple audiences.
In other words, think about the research process as intellectual arbitrage. Build on an idea that is taken for granted by one academic community, and introduce it to a different audience who finds it interesting and valuable. Intellectual arbitrage can give you the benefits of recombinant innovation, without sacrificing focus on a specific audience.
I learned about the benefits of intellectual arbitrage in research that I recently published in Administrative Science Quarterly, with Amir Goldberg and Sameer Srivastava. We developed new measures of cultural diversity in organizations by analyzing the comments that employees write about their companies on Glassdoor.com, a popular employer review website.
The paper combines ideas from from two distinct academic communities: cultural sociology and management literature on organizational culture and performance. Yet, we decided to write the paper for the management audience, figuring that the cultural sociology ideas would be seen as most novel and useful in resolving a debate in the management literature about how cultural diversity impacts organizational performance. We hope that cultural sociologists will be interested in the paper as well, but members of that community take it more for granted that cultural diversity helps people perform creatively. Our focus on the management audience helped us publish, and we think will maximize the paper’s impact.
How can you decide which audience to write for? Try writing two introductions of your paper, one for each audience. Which version reads as more novel and useful? Do your ideas help solve a bigger problem in one literature than the other? Ask colleagues from each intellectual community for feedback about your argument.
Viewing your research as intellectual arbitrage can help you identify the audience that sees your ideas as most novel and useful, and ultimately increase your success in research and publishing.”
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References
Uzzi, Brian, Satyam Mukherjee, Michael Stringer, and Ben Jones. "Atypical combinations and scientific impact." Science 342, no. 6157 (2013): 468-472.
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Matthew Corritore is an Assistant Professor of Strategy & Organization at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University. He earned his PhD in Macro Organizational Behavior from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He studies culture and work in organizations using the tools of computational social science.