My paper 'Epidemical Spread of Scientific Objects', which appeared in Theory and Decision 3 (1973), has elicited reactions from Prof. R. D. Luce and Prof. O. Morgenstern, who questioned the adequacy of the data concerning, respectively, the theory of measurement and the theory of games.
In the paper I presented a theoretical model based on the hypothesis asserting that the decline in the number of publications on a given subject is due to the exhaustion of the topic. As illustrative material for the theoretical considerations, I used, among others, the combined bibliography of the monograph by Ellis (1966) and the expository paper by Suppes and Sinnes (1963) for measurement theory, and the bibliography of the monograph by Luce and Raiffa (1957), claimed by the authors to be nearly complete, for the theory of games.
The data seemed to support the conjecture of the model, indicating some decline after an initial growth.
It appears, however, that I was rather unfortunate in the choice of these two particular theories as illustrative examples. As pointed out by Prof. Lute, the bibliography of Vol. I of the book by Krantz et al. (1971) indicates a continuing growth of measurement theory, whi}e Professor Morgensterrt points out that the bibliography in Tucker and Lute (1959) shows the same to be true for the theory of games 1.
Several comments seem to be in order here. Firstly, the unfortunate predictions for the theory of measurement and the theory of games show that if predictions of the future development of a theory are to be made on the ground of trends in the number of yearly publications, the data ought to be taken from exhaustive bibliographies, or from abstracts.
Secondly, if the data are taken from monographs (even when the author claims that his bibliography is complete), one ought to disregard the period preceding publication substantially longer than that taken by me (possibly as much as 5-6 years).