Levitt In Trouble Again?

Yesterday, he posted the following:

This is What Happens to People Who Listen to Too Much AC/DC...

They grow up to write economics papers like this one, which looks at whether participants in lab experiments get closer to efficient outcomes when exposed to one lead singer of the rock band AC/DC versus another.

I hope for this guy’s sake he has tenure.

Levitt didn't realize that the paper was a joke. The professor who wrote the paper emailed him with the real story. Here's Levitt's correction:

There Is Hope For Economics: The AC/DC Paper Was a Joke

I am delighted to report that the economics paper on AC/DC I blogged about yesterday was meant as a joke. It takes a lot of work to run an experiment on real people, just for a gag paper. It turns out they meant to play the same AC/DC song in both treatments, but made a mistake and accidentally played two different songs. Thus the genesis of the joke paper.

I still think this leaves Professor Oxoby with a bit of explaining to do as to why they were playing AC/DC as part of an experiment in the first place, however.

The comments on this second post, including one by Oxoby who posts the email he sent to Levitt, show that some aren't happy with the correction. Is Levitt in the wrong or are the people leaving comments too uptight?

A very short while back, Levitt blogged about "what [he] would do to maximize terror if [he] were a terrorist with limited resources": Part I, Part II, Part III. People didn't like that one very much either.