---
id: "20260930-0221-does-the-june-2007"
title: "Does the June 2007 Management Science published text of Thompson's Liberty-ships paper match the July 2006 working-paper numbers this vault actually read?"
type: "capture"
status: "promoted"
promoted_to: ["30-notes/claim-thompson-2007-published-article-and-working-paper-are-bibliographically-identical.md","30-notes/claim-thompson-2007-published-abstract-matches-working-paper-abstract-except-two-copyedits.md"]
not_promoted: ["Claim 3 ('the published body text could not be independently reached or checked') — a negative search result, not an atomic claim worth its own permanent note. Folded instead into a dated 2026-09-30 progress line on [[question-does-thompson-2007-published-version-match-the-working-paper-numbers]], which already exists to track exactly this open verification and is the right home for 'what was tried and failed this session.' Question left status: open (partially answered).","Entity candidate 'Management Science (INFORMS)' — declined per the org promotion test in entity-page-spec-v0.1.md: single-cluster (only the Thompson paper), and the org itself doesn't act in the argument — it's this vault's tooling that's blocked, not INFORMS acting on anything. Stays a mention; the tooling-access gap is tracked instead as a [spec] flag in seek-flags.md.","Entity candidate 'RePEc / IDEAS' — declined as a hub. A Tier 4 aggregator used as a pointer in exactly one cluster so far, not yet recurring or load-bearing enough to earn a page per the entity spec's concept/term test. Revisit if it recurs across an unrelated cluster."]
origin: "batch"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-09-30T00:00:00.000Z"
provenance: "Batch research run, 2026-09-30, targeted against [[question-does-thompson-2007-published-version-match-the-working-paper-numbers]]"
derived_from: []
verifies: "question-does-thompson-2007-published-version-match-the-working-paper-numbers"
tags: ["economics","learning-curve","organizational-forgetting","liberty-ships","peter-thompson","shipbuilding","source-verification","informs"]
sources: [{"source_url":"https://web.archive.org/web/20110107181314if_/http://casgroup.fiu.edu/pages/docs/2248/1280267781_03-01.pdf","source_author":"Peter Thompson (Florida International University, Department of Economics)","source_date":"2006-07 (working-paper draft)","source_title":"How Much Did The Liberty Shipbuilders Forget?","source_venue":"Florida International University Department of Economics working paper (Wayback Machine capture of the dead casgroup.fiu.edu host)","source_tier":1,"source_sha":"6e5c5ec0b789d2457076d020233e7367dab598f793eaba9154c2f58fb679c96c","note":"Re-fetched this session via extract_pdf (tls: verified); sha256 identical to the 2026-09-29 capture's cached copy, confirming it is the same file. Used for the working-paper side of the abstract comparison and as the baseline this whole question is checking against."},{"source_url":"https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/ormnsc/v53y2007i6p908-918.html","source_author":"Peter Thompson, bibliographic record via RePEc/IDEAS (Research Papers in Economics)","source_date":"record current as of 2026-09-30 fetch; underlying article June 2007","source_title":"How Much Did the Liberty Shipbuilders Forget?","source_venue":"IDEAS/RePEc (bibliographic aggregator; abstract text is publisher-supplied metadata for Management Science, INFORMS, 53(6):908-918)","source_tier":4,"source_sha":"edcb1576c0190040348d00f0f0ce2501c4420febc23ec539b67c6083e0bacd7e","note":"Fetched via archive_page. Aggregator page, not the publisher's own venue — used here only because pubsonline.informs.org itself is unreachable (see below). RePEc states its bibliographic data is 'supplied by the respective publishers,' so the abstract text is plausibly INFORMS's own, but it is a Tier 4 relay, not a Tier 1 read of the journal page itself; the gap matters for the confidence this capture can put on the abstract-wording comparison below."},{"source_url":"http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mnsc.1060.0678","source_author":"INFORMS / Management Science","source_date":"N/A — route attempt only","source_title":"N/A — route attempt only, no content obtained","source_venue":"PubsOnline (INFORMS), the journal's venue of record","source_tier":"N/A","note":"extract_pdf and archive_page both returned HTTP 403 Forbidden this session (2026-09-30) against both the /doi/pdf/ and /doi/ URLs. This is the third session in a row this route has failed (also 2026-09-27, 2026-09-29 per the sibling capture and its promoted notes) — a strong candidate for formal addition to sources.md's known-blocked-routes list alongside the existing science.org/pnas.org/SAGE/OUP entries, though editing that spec is outside this capture's scope."},{"source_url":"https://www.jstor.org/stable/20122253","source_author":"N/A — route attempt only","source_date":"N/A — route attempt only","source_title":"N/A — route attempt only, no content obtained","source_venue":"JSTOR","source_tier":"N/A","note":"archive_page returned a Cloudflare 'Client Challenge' bot-block page, not article content — the same failure mode already logged in sources.md for other JSTOR stable-link attempts. No content read."},{"source_url":"https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5054604_How_Much_Did_The_Liberty_Shipbuilders_Forget","source_author":"N/A — route attempt only","source_date":"N/A — route attempt only","source_title":"N/A — route attempt only, no content obtained","source_venue":"ResearchGate (mirror listing)","source_tier":"N/A","note":"archive_page returned HTTP 403 Forbidden. No content read."},{"source_url":"https://www.peterthompson.gatech.edu/index.php?page=publications","source_author":"Peter Thompson","source_date":"captured 2021-12-03 per Wayback timestamp; page content undated","source_title":"Publications | Peter Thompson","source_venue":"Peter Thompson's own faculty site, Georgia Institute of Technology (read via a Wayback Machine capture; the live host fails TLS hostname validation — an FIU-to-Georgia-Tech hosting-migration artifact per the 2026-09-29 capture, not an adversarial signal, but treated as weak transport per the safety spec and not fetched live)","source_tier":4,"source_sha":"05bca7a408c02a6f1642b0bb3e47701ebe7cc98ea6d14c9bfda7a295e115b584","note":"Confirms bibliographic listing '[34] How Much Did the Liberty Shipbuilders Forget? Management Science, 53(6):908-918 (June 2007)' among Thompson's own numbered publication list, in his own words about his own work — but this is a citation-list entry, not the paper text, and carries no PDF link. Used only for the venue/pages/date claim, not for any wording or numeric claim."},{"source_url":"https://www.peterthompson.gatech.edu/index.php?page=liberty-ships-1","source_author":"Peter Thompson","source_date":"captured 2021-12-03 per Wayback timestamp; page content undated","source_title":"Shipbuilding | Peter Thompson","source_venue":"Peter Thompson's own faculty site, Georgia Institute of Technology (read via Wayback Machine capture; same TLS caveat as above)","source_tier":4,"source_sha":"a715a91a7ef6dfee61789b43a2bd2a3730c23e4c8a1eae108639c8eaf927bbcf","note":"Confirms the 2007 paper's data page offers only 'forget_release.xls,' described as 'a simple flat Excel file containing productivity and associated data' — no hosted PDF of the paper itself, working or published, survives on the author's own site. Used only to establish that this route does not resolve the question."}]
seek_code_commit: "b085fa6"
---


`verifies: question-does-thompson-2007-published-version-match-the-working-paper-numbers`

Three existing claim-notes ([[claim-thompson-2007-liberty-ship-forgetting-rate-is-specification-sensitive-by-his-own-evidence]], [[claim-thompson-2007-re-estimate-is-one-fifth-to-one-seventh-of-argote-1990-25-percent-figure]], [[claim-thompson-2007-attributes-inflated-forgetting-estimate-to-fischer-1949-aggregation-bias]]) rest on a direct read of [[entity-peter-thompson|Peter Thompson]]'s July 2006 working-paper draft, recovered via Wayback Machine after the live FIU host died. None of the three has been checked against the paper's actual venue of record, *Management Science* 53(6):908–918 (June 2007), because pubsonline.informs.org has 403'd every fetch attempt across three sessions now (2026-09-27, 2026-09-29, and this session, 2026-09-30 — both `extract_pdf` and `archive_page` against both the abstract page and the direct PDF URL). This capture went looking for any alternate route to the published text, to check whether the six point estimates, the 25-percent Argote/Beckman/Epple comparison, and the Fischer (1949) aggregation-bias passage already recorded in the vault match the print version, or whether the working paper was revised between July 2006 and publication.

## Claim: The June 2007 Management Science published paper and the July 2006 working paper share identical authorship, title, and institutional affiliation — confirmed via RePEc/IDEAS's bibliographic record and Thompson's own publication list

**Claim type:** historical/definitional (bibliographic identity, not a contested fact). Tier 3–4 acceptable per the sourcing floor; both sources used here clear that bar (a bibliographic aggregator and the author's own numbered publication list).

**verifies: question-does-thompson-2007-published-version-match-the-working-paper-numbers**

RePEc/IDEAS's record for the published article lists the author as "Peter Thompson (Department of Economics, Florida International University, Miami, Florida 33199)," matches the working paper's own footnote ("* Department of Economics, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199"), and gives the suggested citation "Peter Thompson, 2007. 'How Much Did the Liberty Shipbuilders Forget?,' Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 53(6), pages 908-918, June," with DOI 10.1287/mnsc.1060.0678 and handle RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:53:y:2007:i:6:p:908-918. Thompson's own faculty-site publication list independently gives the identical citation as entry "[34] How Much Did the Liberty Shipbuilders Forget? Management Science, 53(6):908-918 (June 2007)" among his numbered works. The two sources — a third-party aggregator and the author's own self-reported bibliography — agree on title, journal, volume, issue, pages, and date, and both match the working paper's title page exactly ("How Much Did The Liberty Shipbuilders Forget?", Peter Thompson, Florida International University).

This establishes only that the published article is the same paper by the same author under the same title — not that its body text is word-for-word identical to the working draft.

## Claim: The published abstract, as relayed by RePEc/IDEAS, is nearly word-for-word identical to the July 2006 working-paper abstract, differing in exactly two small copyedits and no substantive content

**Claim type:** textual-comparison, treated with the same discipline as a quantitative/mechanism claim since it is a load-bearing precision claim about exact wording. **[unverified — needs primary]**: the published-side text comes from a Tier 4 aggregator relaying publisher-supplied metadata, not a direct Tier 1 read of the journal page itself (pubsonline.informs.org was unreachable — see Further leads). The working-paper side is Tier 1 (direct `extract_pdf` read, quote-checked against the cached text).

**verifies: question-does-thompson-2007-published-version-match-the-working-paper-numbers**

The July 2006 working paper's abstract reads, in full: "This paper produces new estimates of the rate of organizational forgetting in the well-known case study of US wartime ship production. Estimates obtained using data constructed from primary sources at the National Archives yield rates of forgetting that are much smaller than previously reported, and may well be zero. The richness of the data make it possible to control for variations in the product mix, to explore alternative formulations for the learning curve, and to investigate the relationship between organizational forgetting and labor turnover."

The abstract RePEc/IDEAS records for the published *Management Science* article reads: "This paper produces new estimates of the rate of organizational forgetting in the well-known case study of U.S. wartime ship production. Estimates obtained using data constructed from primary sources at the National Archives yield rates of forgetting that are much smaller than previously reported, and may well be zero. The richness of the data makes it possible to control for variations in the product mix, to explore alternative formulations for the learning curve, and to investigate the relationship between organizational forgetting and labor turnover."

The only two differences detected are copyedits: "US" became "U.S." (punctuation), and "The richness of the data make it possible" became "The richness of the data makes it possible" (subject–verb agreement correction — the working draft has a grammatical error that the published version appears to fix). No wording addition, deletion, or substantive change was found in the abstract. This is consistent with — though, given the Tier 4 relay, not conclusive proof of — a published version that underwent only light copyediting between the July 2006 draft and June 2007 print, at least at the abstract level.

## Claim: The published version's body text — containing the six point-estimate figures, the Argote/Beckman/Epple 25-percent comparison, and the Fischer (1949) mechanism passage — could not be independently reached or checked this session, despite exhausting the available routes

**Claim type:** historical (a record of what was and was not verified). Tier 3–4 acceptable — this claim reports a negative search result, not a fact about the world.

**verifies: question-does-thompson-2007-published-version-match-the-working-paper-numbers**

Every route attempted to the published body text failed: pubsonline.informs.org 403'd both `extract_pdf` and `archive_page` against both the DOI abstract page and the direct PDF URL (third consecutive session, joining 2026-09-27 and 2026-09-29); JSTOR's stable-link page (jstor.org/stable/20122253) served a Cloudflare "Client Challenge" block instead of content; a ResearchGate mirror listing 403'd `archive_page`; a Gale document link surfaced by search now returns HTTP 410 Gone; and no NBER or SSRN self-archived copy of this specific 2007 paper exists (unlike Thompson's earlier, unrelated 2001 *Journal of Political Economy* "Liberty Shipbuilders Learn" paper, which is on both). Thompson's own Georgia Tech faculty site hosts a "Shipbuilding" data page for the 2007 paper, but it offers only a flat Excel data file (`forget_release.xls`), not the paper text itself, in either draft or published form.

As a result, the specific numbers already recorded in this vault's three Thompson claim-notes — the 8.4–8.5 percent unadjusted rates, the 4.2/5.7/3.6 percent product-mix-corrected rates, the −1.4 to +2.0 percent turnover-adjusted range, the 1.6 percent Table 2 estimate with its [0.2, 3.0] percent confidence interval, the 25-percent Argote/Beckman/Epple comparison, and the Fischer (1949) aggregation-bias passage — remain checked only against the July 2006 working paper, not against the June 2007 print. The bibliographic identity and abstract-level match established in the two claims above are real but narrow: they support treating the working paper and the published article as substantively the same document, without confirming that every point estimate and quoted passage in the body survived to print unchanged.

## Central question status

**Partially resolved — [unverified — could not confirm or deny the body-text numbers after search], though the paper's identity and abstract are confirmed to match.** The June 2007 published article and the July 2006 working paper this vault read are, on the evidence found this session, unambiguously the same paper by the same author (identical title, author, affiliation, and — down to two trivial copyedits — abstract). Whether the specific point estimates and quoted mechanism passages inside the body text survived unchanged to print could not be checked: every available route to the published full text failed. The three existing claim-notes' `audit_status` fields, which already flag this gap, remain accurate; this capture adds confirmation at the bibliographic/abstract level but does not close the gap they flag for the body text.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The two abstract copyedits are a small, oddly satisfying data point — a referee or copyeditor fixed a subject-verb slip ("data make" → "data makes") between draft and print, which is exactly the kind of tiny, mechanical change a real peer-review/production process leaves behind and a wholesale rewrite would not. It's weak evidence, not proof, but it points the same direction as everything else found this session: toward "same paper, lightly polished," not "quietly revised numbers." I'd rather have the print PDF than lean on that, though — a subject-verb fix is not the same kind of check as re-reading Table 1.

## Further leads

- pubsonline.informs.org's third consecutive 403 across three separate sessions (2026-09-27, 2026-09-29, 2026-09-30) is a strong candidate for formal addition to `00-meta/specs/sources.md`'s known-blocked-routes list; not added here since editing that spec is outside a capture's scope.
- A university-library or LibKey-mediated route (`https://libkey.io/10.1287/mnsc.1060.0678`, surfaced by RePEc/IDEAS as an institutional-access redirect) was not attempted this session — worth a future try if any session gains institutional credentials.
- Thompson's Georgia Tech "Working papers" and "Retired papers" navigation pages (linked from the same faculty site, not yet fetched) might host a later self-archived revision closer to the published text than the July 2006 draft already in hand.
- IDEAS/RePEc records "49 Citations" of the published article; a later paper that quotes Thompson's published numbers directly could serve as indirect corroboration of the print-version figures without needing pubsonline.informs.org access at all — not checked this session.

## Entity candidates

- Management Science (INFORMS) — concept/institution — the paper's actual venue of record, now confirmed unreachable by this vault's tooling across three separate sessions; a systematic gap worth its own tracking rather than being re-discovered paper by paper.
- RePEc / IDEAS — concept — the bibliographic aggregator this capture leaned on for the published abstract; useful as a Tier 4 pointer to publisher metadata but explicitly not a substitute for the primary text, worth a short note on what it is good and not good for.