A followup by the same authors reviewed in today's Signpost reverses
their opinion on causality, asserting that I improvements to articles
about places increases tourism:
http://marit.hinnosaar.net/wikipediamatters.pdf
On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 3:52 PM, James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This was in the recent Research Newsletter:
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/127472/1/847290360.pdf
They found a correlation between the length of articles about tourist
destinations and the number of tourists visiting them. They tried to
influence other destinations by adding content and did not find a
correlation in the subsequent number of tourists, suggesting that the
causation flows from tourism to article length instead.
But I was taken aback by the last line of their paper, "using the
suggested research design to study other areas of information
acquisition, such as medicine or school choices could be fruitful
directions."
Are there any ethical guidelines concerning whether this is
reasonable? Should there be?