  In this work, we aim to understand the mechanisms driving academic
collaboration. We begin by building a model for how researchers split their
effort between multiple papers, and how collaboration affects the number of
citations a paper receives, supported by observations from a large real-world
publication and citation dataset, which we call the h-Reinvestment model. Using
tools from the field of Game Theory, we study researchers' collaborative
behavior over time under this model, with the premise that each researcher
wants to maximize his or her academic success. We find analytically that there
is a strong incentive to collaborate rather than work in isolation, and that
studying collaborative behavior through a game-theoretic lens is a promising
approach to help us better understand the nature and dynamics of academic
collaboration.
