Just to clarify Jas's comment about McCullough and Vinod (2003), the
followups in the AER show that McCullough and Vinod were largely
incorrect [see the replies by Wiggins and Drukker (2004) and
McCullough and Vinod (2004)], though there is much to be said for the
spirit of their paper.  In the end, the solution indeed exists with
some rescaling and the solution is quite close to the result
originally reported by Shachar and Nalebuff.  My suspicion is that
they were unlucky, there are plenty of false numerical solutions out
there; they just found one that appeared false and was not.

Their conclusion [in 2004 and other papers] concerns a replication
policy and the need for both code and data.  Whether one is
inherently skeptical or otherwise of the programming talents of
social scientists is a non-issue; we have no way of verifying this
conclusion without evidence and we seem to have decided, as a
discipline, that we would just rather not know.  The most pernicious
of falsehoods survive under the guise of science without the critical
attributes that make them scientific -- reproducibility.

Best,
RWW

Robert W. Walker
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
Program in Applied Statistics and Computation
Washington University in Saint Louis
Campus Box 1063
One Brookings Drive
Saint Louis, Missouri 63130-3899
rww at wustl.edu
http://rww.wustl.edu

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