Someone suggested that we list eSapience in our Blogroll, which I just did, because they have a number of high quality papers on their site. Of course, none of the links we post to other sites are in any way endorsments, and as the discerning reader will have noticed, our collection of links runs the gamut from progressive (e.g., AAI) to conservative (e.g., CATO) with a generous helping of lunatic fringe on both sides. (No, I won’t provide examples. I get enough email as it is.)

eSapience is an interesting outfit. A couple of months ago, one of their executives asked if I was interested in contributing to “the online companion to Competition Policy International.” He advertised CPI as a peer-reviewed journal with a highly distinguished editorial board. My initial interest waned quickly when (in the course of my rather perfunctory due diligence) I got no answers to a rather straightforward question: Who are eSapience’s owners and sponsors? At that point I decided that eSapience would be doing just fine without me and vice versa.

Today, when I googled eSapience for their URL, I found this post at the Daily Kos. The author quotes an article by Clay Risen of The New Republic (which I can’t download, because I have no subscription; if anyone could send me a copy, I’d appreciate it), who reports as follows:

Very little information exists about eSapience […]. Its website, eSapience.org, goes directly to something called the “eSapience Center for Competition Policy” (eCCP), a sort of virtual think tank that organizes conferences, promotes papers, and even publishes a journal, all of which have a decidedly conservative, free-market bent (the journal’s editorial board, for example, features a bevy of University of Chicago legal scholars and economists, including Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook). All of this seems dryly academic and above board–in fact, there is hardly any explanation of what eSapience itself actual[ly] is.

[Update from DF: the New Republic article is available here.]

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