Winners Curse in Academic Publishing

In the Economist, about winning and truth:

" ... 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. Consider, for example, bids to develop an oil field. Most of the offers are likely to cluster around the true value of the resource, so the highest bidder probably paid too much. The same thing may be happening in scientific publishing ... ".

Although this article is not about auctions, see previous posts about auction analysis.