Alexandru Marcoci (London School of Economics), James Nguyen (University of Notre Dame)
The fragmentation of academic disciplines forces individuals to specialise. In doing so, they become experts over their area of research. But under certain innocuous assumptions, this gives rise to an impossibility result when it comes to aggregating the beliefs of experts to deliver the beliefs of a discipline as a whole. We show that when experts' beliefs come into conflict, they should waive their expert status. If they do, then they can guarantee that the discipline remains consistent.
