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Adverse selection of reviewers
Author(s) -
García Jose A.,
RodriguezSánchez Rosa,
FdezValdivia Joaquín
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.23249
Subject(s) - adverse selection , incentive , payment , selection (genetic algorithm) , agency (philosophy) , private information retrieval , field (mathematics) , computer science , actuarial science , key (lock) , business , economics , microeconomics , sociology , artificial intelligence , mathematics , computer security , world wide web , social science , pure mathematics
Adverse selection occurs when a firm signs a contract with a potential worker but his/her key skills are still not known at that time, which leads the employer to make a wrong decision. In this article, we study the example of adverse selection of reviewers when a potential referee whose ability is his private information faces a finite sequence of review processes for several scholarly journals, one after the other. Our editor's problem is to design a system that guarantees that each manuscript is reviewed by a referee if and only if the reviewer's ability matches the review's complexity. As is typically the case in solving problems of adverse selection in agency theory, the journal editor offers a menu of contracts to the potential referee, from which the reviewer chooses the contract that is best for him given his ability. The optimal contract will be the one that provides the right incentives to match the complexity of the review and the ability of the reviewer. The payment of contracts is made through a proportional increment of the reviewer factor, which measures the importance of reviewers to their field.