Strevens (2003) argues the priority rule functions as a device for efficiently allocating research labor, driven by the winner-confers-all structure of scientific benefit

philosophy-of-sciencepriority-rulemichael-strevensdivision-of-cognitive-laborresource-allocationcredit-assignmentsociology-of-science

Michael Strevens's "The Role of the Priority Rule in Science" (Journal of Philosophy 100:55–79, 2003) treats the priority rule — all credit to the first discoverer, none to runners-up — not as a matter of fairness, incentive to publish, or measurability, but as the consequence of treating a scientific reward scheme "as a device for achieving an allocation of resources among different research programs that provides as much benefit as possible to society." His stated result: "I show that the priority system is especially well suited to finding an efficient allocation of resources."

The argument rests on an economic model borrowed from Charles Sanders Peirce and Philip Kitcher (Kitcher's "The Division of Cognitive Labor," 1990): research programs have success functions mapping invested resources to probability of success, and the problem is to spread a fixed pool of worker-hours across competing programs so as to maximize expected social benefit. Strevens distinguishes an additive case (independent goals — a cancer cure and the Higgs boson, where two successes are worth twice one) from a winner-confers-all case (rival programs chasing the same goal, where a second success is worth nothing once the first lands). The priority rule is his answer to the second case, "characteristic of scientific inquiry, in which any success in an endeavor subsequent to the first success brings little additional benefit to society" (this second clause reproduces the paper's wording closely but PDF line-wrap hyphenation prevented a continuous verbatim match at capture — treat as paraphrase; the load-bearing first quote is verbatim).

This reframes the vault's priority cluster: where Merton casts priority as institutional norm-enforcement (a sociological account) and multiple discovery as science's dominant pattern, Strevens offers a rival economic explanation of the same rule. The exact machinery is at claim-strevens-priority-mechanism-marge-goal-priority-risk-aversion; the important limit on how strongly this can be stated is at claim-strevens-does-not-prove-priority-optimal-in-winner-confers-all. See also entity-credit-assignment and observation-priority-adjudication-is-documentary-source-criticism.