This sounds an awful lot like the situation in job hunting, at least in IT -- you have to lie as much as you can get away with because if you don't, the position will go to someone who did and you starve. The required level of bullshit increases over time in the manner of a dollar auction.

For professional academics I suppose it is job hunting, in a sense. I wonder if it generalizes to any situation where there's a surplus of competitors for a difficult-to-measure result and opting-out of the competition isn't an option.