Search and Research: The influence of editorial boards on journals' quality

Damien Besancenot, Joao Faria and Kim Huynh ()
Additional contact information
Kim Huynh: LEM - Laboratoire d'Économie Moderne - UP2 - Université Panthéon-Assas

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This paper considers the search for the best papers by the editors of an academic journal. Editors' search is sequential. At each period, each editor receives one submission from a researcher and has to decide if she accepts or rejects the paper. The editorial board is heterogeneous, some editors being more demanding than others. On the academic side, researchers choose the quality level of their papers in order to maximize their utility function taking as given the composition of the editorial board. We show that three equilibria may occur. When the number of the less demanding editors is high, or if the editors exhibit great differences in their demand for quality, the journal will attract fewer submissions, publish a small number of papers and these papers will be of low quality. When the editorial board is composed by a homogeneous set of very demanding editors, the journal will publish a high number of high quality papers. For some intermediate structure of the board, a situation of multiple equilibria allows a hybrid equilibrium to exist in which the journal receives both good and bad papers. The long run and welfare implications of these equilibria are analyzed.

Keywords: Editors; Search Equilibrium; Publication market; Academic journals.; Academic journals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-03-25
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00370785
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00370785/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Search and research: the influence of editorial boards on journals’ quality (2012)
Working Paper: Search and Research: The influence of editorial boards on journals' quality (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00370785

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().