False claims in a widely-cited paper. No corrections. No consequences

A couple months ago we had a post, This paper in Management Science has been cited more than 6,000 times. Wall Street executives, top government officials, and even a former U.S. Vice President have all referenced it. It’s fatally flawed, and the scholarly community refuses to do anything about it. which was about, ummm, a fatally flawed but very influential paper in Management Science.

The paper in question claimed to find that “High Sustainability companies significantly outperform their counterparts over the long-term, both in terms of stock market and accounting performance,” and I conjecture that one reason for the paper’s great success was that it was pushing a feel-good message that would be popular all over the political spectrum: for the left, it’s evidence in favor of environmental and social sustainability; for the right, it’s an example of the success of the free market, implying that if you care about sustainability, you can get it without government regulation; and, for the center, it’s a message that the system works. It fits in just fine with the baseline smug business-school ideology that firms do well by doing good.

The above story came from my occasional collaborator Andy King, a business school professor himself but of a more disagreeable variety (just as I’m a disagreeable social scientist).

A couple days ago King sent me a followup email:

I would love to get your thoughts and advice on correcting a misreported study.

The publication in question is Eccles, Ioannou, and Serafeim (2014), “The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Processes and Performance,” published in Management Science. It is cited roughly 2,000 times per year and has had considerable influence on investment practice and public policy. It is the most cited publication in MS since 2006. Unfortunately, the method described in the paper is not the method the authors actually used. The authors finally acknowledged this in September 2025, after two years of pressure. Yet they have refused to submit a corrigendum.

I have been in contact with the journals, Management Science, but their policies allow only authors to request corrections. They did allow me to submit a comment for review, since they judged the authors non-responsive, but it must go through a lengthy review process.

I have also contacted Research Integrity Offices, as I believe this constitutes an ongoing violation: the authors are knowingly refusing to correct an acknowledged misreport in their study.– London Business School (Ioannou) claims there is no violation because he did not conduct the analysis. (To me this seems irrelevant to the issue of correcting a misreport.)

– Harvard Business School (Serafeim’s employer) has declined to disclose the existence or outcome of any internal review.

– Oxford (where Eccles is currently affiliated) claims Harvard is responsible for Eccles’s actions, since the research occurred when he was at HBS.

– I contacted the UK RIO, but they say they are powerless.

Do you have any ideas about what else I can try?

Also, are things generally this bad, or is it just research from business schools?

My response: Yeah, I’ve pretty much given up on Research Integrity Offices and similar organizations after the two experiences described here (University of California professor does blatant data misrepresentation, no consequences) and here (Cornell professor commits tons of research fraud, eventually he’s forced to leave but it takes a long time, and the university does not respond to outside concerns). Or, closer to home, there’s this story of Columbia University continuing to deny that they misreported their U.S. News data. And the Rutgers political science professor discussed here who got an award from the American Political Science Association for a book with plagiarized material . . . and after the APSA was informed of the plagiarism, they refused to take the award away or even have it shared with the people whose work had been copied.

As I wrote about a couple of these cases:

What’s really bad is when the cheaters do a Lance Armstrong and attack the people who reveal the problem. When engaging in this attack on truth-tellers, the cheaters often play the Javert card, acting as if it’s completely fine to plagiarize, and that their critics are obsessed weirdos. It’s as if all the people that matter are buddies at a country club, and they have to deal with impertinent caddies who call them out on every damn mulligan. They may get even more annoyed at people like us who are members of the club but still side with the caddies.

So, yeah, really disgusting that these guys are still teaching at major business schools.

I think the ultimate solution would be to put all these people into a newly created university, Second Chance U. It could be a pretty amazing place, including all the people mentioned above, along with the mathematician who wrote a chess book that took material for online sources without attribution (not plagiarism, in that plagiarism applies to the wording, not to content, but still way uncool), the disgraced primatologist, the other disgraced primatologist, Dr. Anil Potti, Laurence Tribe, Lawrence Summers, any other Larrys we can dredge up, and various poor unfortunates such as Dan Ariely, who through no fault of his own keeps ending up as a coauthor on papers with fake data. It would be the only university where students are absolutely encouraged to use chatbots to write their term papers!

OK, more seriously, in answer to Andy King’s question: No, I don’t know what to do. I’ll scream about it here, just as I keep screaming about Freakonomics pushing stupid science, just as I keep screaming about that stupid physicist and his $100,000 per citation, etc etc etc. It doesn’t seem to be doing much, but that’s all I’ve got.

Speaking up about it is still net positive though. It may not affect whether they get fired, but should affect who hires them next, the grants they win in future, and the reputation of the institutions that harbour them. We don’t have many direct interventions, but the indirect ones have some effect. If not in correcting the public record, at least in reminding others who are tempted to fabricate that you will be deservedly branded as a fraud.