Does anyone know of any studies examining how much firms benefit (if any) from non-compete agreements? While doing research on that question, I found this interesting paper: BIASES IN THE INTERPRETATION AND USE OF RESEARCH RESULTS Robert J. MacCoun Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720-7320, [EMAIL PROTECTED] "When self scrutiny fails, we rely on institutional safeguards such as peer reviewing, research replication, meta-analysis, expert panels, and so on. A detailed review of these topics is beyond the scope of this essay, but it should be noted that many of these practices have themselves been scrutinized using empirical research methods. For example, Peters and Ceci (1982 and accompanying commentary) provided a dramatic demonstration of the unreliability of the peer review process. A dozen scientific articles were retyped and resubmitted (with fictitious names and institutions) to the prestigious journals that had published them 18-32 months earlier. Three were recognized by the editors; eight of the remaining nine not only went unrecognized, but got rejected the second time around. (Though one suspects that many articles would get rejected the second time around even when recognized.) Cicchetti (1991) and Cole (1992) provide equally sobering but more rigorously derived evidence on the noisiness of the peer review process, citing dismally low interreferee reliabilities in psychology journals (in the .19 to .54 range), medical journals (.31 to .37), and the NSF grant reviewing process (.25 in economics, .32 in physics). To make matters worse, at least some of this small proportion of stable variance in ratings is probably attributable to systematic bias, though the limited research base precludes any strong conclusions (see Blank, 1991; Gardner & Wilcox, 1993; Gilbert, Williams, & Lundberg, 1994; Laband & Piette, 1994; Rennie, 1997). " available at: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~maccoun/ar_bias.html
