Rejected: Career concerns in the refereeing process
Ascensión Andina-DÃaz (),
José A. GarcÃa-MartÃnez () and
Nektaria Glynia ()
Additional contact information
Ascensión Andina-DÃaz: Departamento de TeorÃa e Historia Económica, Universidad de Málaga
José A. GarcÃa-MartÃnez: Dpto. Estudios Económicos y Financieros, Universidad Miguel Hernández
Nektaria Glynia: Dep. Economics, University of Cyprus
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Ascension Andina-Diaz
No 2024-02, Working Papers from Universidad de Málaga, Department of Economic Theory, Málaga Economic Theory Research Center
Abstract:
We analyze the effect of career concerns on the refereeing process. We consider a journal editor and two referees who may differ in reputation and ability. A referee’s reputation is public information, while a referee’s ability is private information. We identify an incentive for low-ability referees to reject good papers —a phenomenon we call over-rejection— and find that this incentive increases with the referee’s reputation. We show that over-rejection decreases with competition, referee homogeneity, and the anonymity of the refereeing process. In contrast to low-ability experts, high-ability referees are truthful in equilibrium. Since a referee with a higher reputation is ex-ante more likely to be high-ability, our results suggest that the probability of rejection is inverted U-shaped in the referee’s reputation. We empirically test this result. We use data from Card and DellaVigna (2020) for submissions to four top economic journals in the period 2003-2013 and use the referee’s publication record as a proxy for the referee’s reputation. We find that the probability of sending a negative recommendation increases with the referee’s reputation in the early stages of the career and decreases thereafter, suggesting an inverted U-shape form in line with our theoretical results.
Keywords: Career concerns: refereeing process; reputation; ability; endogenous transparency; competition; information transmission. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2024-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic and nep-sog
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://theeconomics.uma.es/malagawpseries/Papers/METCwp2024-3.pdf First version, 2024 (application/pdf)
Related works:
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:mal:wpaper:2024-3
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from Universidad de Málaga, Department of Economic Theory, Málaga Economic Theory Research Center Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ascension Andina ().