Boring Doesn't Sell

From the Economist:

In economic theory the winner’s curse refers to the idea that someone who places the winning bid in an auction may have paid too much...The same thing may be happening in scientific publishing, according to a new analysis. With so many scientific papers chasing so few pages in the most prestigious journals, the winners could be the ones most likely to oversell themselvesto trumpet dramatic or important results that later turn out to be false. This would produce a distorted picture of scientific knowledge, with less dramatic (but more accurate) results either relegated to obscure journals or left unpublished.

(Hat tip: Tyler Cowen)