For a finance theorist, the key to achieving peer recognition was the development of good models. "Good" meant economically plausible, innovative, and analytically tractable. A model that neither its developer nor anyone else could solve was unlikely to be seen as good. The most influential models, notably the Capital Asset Pricing Model and the Black-Scholes-Merton model, yielded as their solutions relatively simple equations. However, a good model also could not be "obvious" and thus at risk of being seen by theorists' peers as trivial (as Sharpe had feared would happen to the first equilibrium model he produced in his work on capital asset pricing).

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 1098