Playing the Odds: Pascal’s Wager and Decision Making in the Long Scholarly Conversation

This talk explores some of the philosophical issues surrounding the nature of the scholarly record and current challenges in academic libraries. The discussion arises from a 2011 Chronicle of Higher Education feature on a widely influential 1979 article entitled “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Making Under Risk,” which proposed a new model for how people assess risk and weigh decision factors. The theory has been applied to dozens of disciplines and cited thousands of times, and it has applications in academic collection development as well as everywhere else. It addressed the limitations of Utility Theory, which grew out of Pascal’s Wager (i.e., it’s safer to bet on the existence of God), but didn’t adequately explain how people— gamblers and insurance buyers, for instance—actually weigh risks and make decisions. The pace of change and new demands facing libraries offer the opportunity to ask new questions about the nature of the scholarly record. Increasing ubiquity and transience of information, along with rapidly shifting notions of authorship and ownership, offer some interesting questions about the role of academic library collections in scholarly communication as a whole.