Washed Out by the Crowd? Accountability under Sequential Review

Siming Ye

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Abstract: When an early information producer is judged only after others have reviewed and revised the work, the same review that sharpens the final decision can blur the question of who deserves the credit. This paper asks how an organization can still reward careful early work once a chain of later reviewers has acted on it. In the model, an analyst's hidden effort makes an initial report more likely to be right; a sequence of reviewers then reacts to it; and the organization can pay only on the record this process leaves behind. The main result splits the value of any such record into two parts: how much effort improved the first report, and how well the final record still indicates whether the first report was accurate. When later reviewers can overturn a flawed report, review improves decisions but washes the analyst's effort out of the final outcome; therefore, rewarding the final outcome stops working, while rewarding agreement between the first and last word has incentive value instead. When the first report is simply copied by downstream reviewers, the reverse holds. Which reward is better comes down to one thing: how likely the review process is to repair an initial mistake.

Date: 2026-07
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