Do you know the name of the first bank in the United States? The First Bank of The United States of course. How about the second bank? The Second Bank of the United States. And after that it seems like every time a bank opens in a new place for the first time that bank calls itself First Bank of The New Place. (Try your favorite place. Here’s mine.)
Why? Because only the first can be The First. If people trust banks more the longer they have been around, then in equilibrium the first bank will call itself the First Bank and everyone will know who was first.
Titles of papers have something in common with names of banks. A paper titled Law and Finance is guaranteed to be the seminal paper in the field because if it were not then that title would have already been taken. You can go ahead and cite it without actually reading it. By contrast, you can safely ignore a paper with a title like Valuation and Dynamic Replication of Contingent Claims in a General Market Enviornmnet Based on the Beliefs-Preferences Guage Symmetry even if you don’t know what any of those words mean. The title is essentially telling you “Don’t read me. Instead go and read a paper whose title is simply Valuation of Contingent Claims. If you have any questions after reading that, you might look into dynamic replication and then beliefs, preferences, and if after all that you still haven’t found what you’re looking for, check here for the lowdown on guage symmetry.”
Two pieces of advice follow from these observations. First, find the simplest title not yet taken for your papers. One word titles are the best. Second, before you get started on a paper, think about the title. If you can’t come up with a short title for it then its probably not worth writing.
The absolute worst thing you can do with your title is to insert a colon into it. (quiet down beavis!) As in, Torture: A Model of Dynamic Commitment Problems. Or Kludged: Asymptotically Inefficient Evolution. In the first case you have just ruined a seminal-signaling one-word title by adding spurious specificity. In the second, you just took an intriguing one-world title and turned it into a yawner.
The second worst kind of title is the question mark title. “Is the Folk Theorem Robust?” This says to the reader: “You picked this up because you want to know if the folk theorem is robust. Well, if I knew the answer to that I would have told you right away in the title. But look, all I could do is repeat the question, so you can safely assume that you won’t find the answer in this paper.”
(Drawing: Back in the Snow from www.f1me.net)
Cheap Talk 
22 comments
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January 18, 2011 at 3:03 am
Guan Yang
The 1791–1811 bank’s actual legal name was the Bank of the United States. It was only later called the First Bank to distinguish it from the 1816–1836 bank, which was also named the Bank of the United States.
January 18, 2011 at 5:03 pm
SpotCash
I always refer to them as BUSI and BUSII
January 18, 2011 at 10:09 am
Wei
Hi Jeff: but this gives incentives for people to rush to a set of papers with great one word titles and every following paper has to cite it, good or bad.
January 18, 2011 at 10:21 am
jeff
yes. topic-squatting. the question is whether, given existing incentives toward incremental extensionism, this incentive is better or worse at the margin.
January 18, 2011 at 11:25 am
k
some might say “Is the Folk Theorem robust?” is a humbler way of saying “Yes it is” or “No it isn’t”
also it might a pooling equilibrium, if some people believe that the Folk theorem is robust and how dare you question it, while others believe that it is much too much…
…this will only work under the assumption that once you get someone to start reading the paper, irrespective of their beliefs, you hope you argument will convince them of the validity of your result…
…and the other assumption is with regard to your objective function: you want to reach out to more people (presumably this is not too problematic an assumption).
January 18, 2011 at 1:23 pm
Troy
This one goes to two! You missed an even better title from the same author, complete with not one but two colons: Derivatives Use: Valuation and hedging of contingent claims on power with spikes: A non-Markovian approach
It’s like the title is an outline of the paper’s organizational structure.
January 18, 2011 at 1:33 pm
Emil
What do we infer about Fifth Third Bank from this?
January 18, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Alex H
This has long been one of my favorites!
January 18, 2011 at 2:21 pm
Titles
[…] Jeff Ely argues that short titles for academic papers signal seminal works, whereas longer, more complex […]
January 18, 2011 at 5:16 pm
EB
The one-word-title idea does not convince me, in particular not for a paper. Maybe for a book, but definitely not for a paper. I would never read a paper called, say, Finance. It sounds too generic and pretentious. On the other hand, “Finance: A Brief History” is much better: I know what to expect from a paper like this… I also like question mark titles… I don’t know how you choose the papers to read/cite, but I’m not sure that the length of the title is the right indicator.
January 18, 2011 at 7:45 pm
dan
clearly a testable theory.. can at least easily look at correlation of title length and cites.. maybe good project for an undergrad
your theory makes sense anyway, at least for big shots like you .. but for little guys like me i’m not so sure. i could write a paper called ‘kludged’ and no one would read it. if i write ‘kludged: a new theory of the sunk cost fallacy’ people interested in sunk costs more likely to check it out, no ?
at least that’s one way to defend my colons. i guess i’m saying there could be separating equilibrium here – at least based on reputation – hopefully not quality (! )
January 19, 2011 at 12:29 am
improbable
If you really can write the first paper titled “Law and Finance” then sure, you should call it that. But you are already a big shot I think if you can do this, and people will read it.
In a more incremental field, where there are many papers making technical progress on similar ideas, I think the rule might run the other way. The obvious short title becomes the name of the subfield, and using some variation of it helps you disappear among a million papers with almost indistinguishable titles. Then it is a blessing to come across one which squeezes the abstract into the title. That one you don’t have to look at again to decide where (or whether) to cite it.
January 19, 2011 at 9:11 am
EB
I wouldn’t read a paper just called Torture even if it was written by a big shot. It’s not a book, it’s a paper. Before reading it, I want to know for example how it analyze torture. From a legal point of view? Historical? Political? A title like that is not informative at all.
Even though I agree that usually “less is more”, I also think that a title must be somehow informative, otherwise is just a poor title. Moreover, following the one-word reasoning, “Structural Breaks” would be superior to “A Bayesian Test For Structural Breaks”… I don’t think so…
January 19, 2011 at 10:12 am
rgr
i don’t think you titled this post in a right way… you really talk about branding not titleing… A title main objective is to be informative, not to be appealing!!!
January 19, 2011 at 2:56 pm
My Name: Does It Matter?
You’re right. You named this post ‘Titles’. If you would have named it
Titles: Do They Matter?
I never, ever in a million years would have ever, ever, ever come to read this post.
January 19, 2011 at 3:04 pm
jeff
exactly why i didn’t read your comment
January 20, 2011 at 12:08 am
Gary Kirwan
I liked that last that last one with the question mark title. It is so so true 🙂
January 21, 2011 at 7:37 pm
Cory
“Well, if I knew the answer to that I would have told you right away in the title. But look, all I could do is repeat the question, so you can safely assume that you won’t find the answer in this paper.”
Too funny – I laughed out loud.
January 24, 2011 at 9:56 am
Phil Rothman
Ed Prescott seems to have had a wee bit of academic success in violating your ‘absolute worst thing’ rule. See, e.g., ‘Rules Rather Than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans’ and ‘The equity premium: A puzzle.’
January 25, 2011 at 1:55 pm
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