Abstract
Research on the credit economy in academic science has typically assumed that academics are expected credit maximizers without argument. How might this assumption be justified? And how might the measure-theoretic foundations of credit be secured? Two approaches are considered. One in which credit is equated with citations and one, based on von Neumann's expected utility theorem, in which credit is constructed from academics' preferences over lotteries among research records. The latter is shown to be the weakest possible defense of expected credit maximization in a formally precise sense, so those assuming expected credit maximization are committed to it.
