Economics and Finance Research Talk

Economics and Finance Research Talk Topic: Tactical Refereeing and Signaling by Publishing Speaker: Sergey Popov (Cardiff University) Abstract: The institution of peer reviewing is used ubiquitously in hiring, promotional, and evaluation decisions, within academia and beyond. It is usually conducted to allocate limited resources, such as the budget of a funder or the pages of a journal. With limited capacity, peer review may bias evaluations, precisely because approving a peer's worthy project consumes capacity, making the referee's own project less likely to be approved. I show that limited capacity is inconsistent with a hypothesis that the decision-maker's policy is chosen to stimulate efforts, and I discuss possible decision-maker motivations that could lead to a limited capacity policy.

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