Can Author Manipulation of AI Referees be Welfare Improving?

Joshua Gans

No 34082, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper examines a new moral hazard in delegated decision-making: authors can embed hidden instructions—known as prompt injections—to bias AI referees in academic peer review. If AI reviews are inexpensive, referees may delegate fully. If AI quality is low, this leads to market collapse. The paper shows that the possibility of manipulation, combined with moderate detection, can paradoxically improve welfare in this low-quality regime. With intermediate detection probabilities, only low-quality authors undertake manipulation, and detection becomes informative about quality, inducing referees to mix between manual and AI reviews. This mixed-strategy equilibrium disciplines referees and generates information, potentially sustaining the market when AI quality is low. However, this benefit vanishes when AI quality is intermediate or high; in these cases, strong detection is optimal as it enables an efficient pure AI market. Thus, prompt injection can play a welfare-enhancing role, but only when AI reviews are easily produced but insufficiently accurate. The results highlight a non-monotonic relationship between enforcement and welfare in the presence of weak AI technologies.

JEL-codes: D82 D86 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ain, nep-mic and nep-sog
Note: PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34082.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:34082

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34082
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().