Having heard an economist lament that he would give his "right arm" to be published in the prestigious American Economic Review, a team led by Arthur E. Attema of Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Netherlands set out to discover whether his colleagues would indeed sacrifice a limb for publication. The team asked, essentially, by how many years the economists would be willing to shorten their lifetimes in exchange for publication in the journal, then compared that with the participants' answers to how many additional years they would accept in exchange for losing the thumb of their writing hand. Results from the 85 respondents imply that they would sacrifice more than half a thumb for an AER publication. At least one economist refused to answer on the grounds that the questions were ridiculous.
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