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Is economics on a highway to hell?

University of Calgary associate professor Robert Oxoby may be forgiven for thinking so.

His study examining how the songs of two different AC/DC frontmen influence decision-making made international headlines after it was noted by famed Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt.

Only one problem: It was a joke.

"I find it kind of sad, to be honest," says Dr. Oxoby, an economist who plays bass in a rockabilly band in his spare time.

His spoof study serves as yet another cautionary tale about not believing everything you read on the Internet.

But the research ruckus has also fed into a very real debate about the future of economics. Some say the fact that anyone even thought the AC/DC study might be serious is a sign the profession has lost its way.

It all started when Dr. Oxoby was stuck in a Vancouver airport bar, listening to stranded travellers rehash one of music history's great debates: Who was the better lead singer of the heavy metal band - Bon Scott, who died in 1980, or Brian Johnson, who replaced him?

Dr. Oxoby recalled an abandoned study by a Calgary graduate student who had planned to research the effects of music on decision-making. By mistake, she played different AC/DC songs to her test subjects - providing Dr. Oxoby with the data he needed to spuriously determine that listening to Brian Johnson-era AC/DC leads to more efficient decision-making. In a few minutes, Dr. Oxoby dashed out a professional-looking paper featuring the requisite jargon ("using non-parametric Wilcoxon rank-sum tests, we can reject the hypothesis...").

With his tongue firmly in cheek, he concluded: "Our analysis has direct implications for policy and organizational design: When policy makers or employers are engaging in negotiations (or setting up environments in which others will negotiate) and are interested in playing the music of AC/DC, they should choose from the band's Brian Johnson-era discography."

He posted it online and sent it to friends for a laugh. (Economics has a proud tradition of mock studies, he notes, such as the seminal 1974 report, "The Economics of Brushing Teeth.")

But Dr. Levitt didn't get the joke when he stumbled upon the study. He mentioned it disapprovingly on his widely read Freakonomics blog, which is hosted by The New York Times, and wrote, "I hope for this guy's sake he has tenure."

To paraphrase one of Mr. Johnson's hits, that's when the walls started shaking, the earth started quaking and Dr. Oxoby's mind began aching.

His personal Web page, which usually registers a few visitors a week, started getting thousands of hits. The Sydney Morning Herald, in a double-bylined story, reported the study as fact without contacting Dr. Oxoby. As Mr. Scott is Australian and Mr. Johnson is British, the silly conclusion was taken quite seriously - the headline screamed, "This is TNT: Bon wasn't best frontman."

Hate mail poured into Dr. Oxoby's mailbox, both from enraged fans of Mr. Scott and from people indignant over frivolous academic research. (No taxpayer dollars were spent on the original study, Dr. Oxoby says.)

"It's just strange," Dr. Oxoby says. "People take the Internet to be news now, and nobody checks any facts ... it's like a bad game of telephone."

Dr. Levitt eventually corrected the record on his blog. But the joke reawakened some serious criticism of the very type of economics Dr. Levitt has popularized.

Though he scoffed at the notion of an economist studying AC/DC, the Freakonomics author is known for his offbeat research subjects, such as sumo wrestling and the game show The Weakest Link. An article in The New Republic last April questioned whether Dr. Levitt and his admirers are transforming economics into "cute-o-nomics," bypassing weighty questions in favour of cleverness. The problem is not that Dr. Oxoby wrote a joke paper, one Canadian economist says, but that it was taken seriously.

"Oxoby's paper - complete with references, graphs, and university letterhead - is a brilliant parody of what has become the mainstay of academic economics," says Erin Weir of the Progressive Economics Forum. "The scholarly journals are full of short, blandly written articles that provide mathematically precise responses to very narrowly defined questions of dubious relevance."

For his part, Dr. Oxoby looks forward to returning to his real research in behavioural economics, which focuses on how individuals form groups and enforce group norms. Ironically, he's also planning an actual study into how music affects cognitive abilities, especially in children with autism.

But don't expect to see him making blog headlines again, if he can help it: He has no plans for a regressive analysis of the efficacy of David Lee Roth compared with Sammy Hagar.