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CITATIONS AND INCENTIVES IN ACADEMIC CONTESTS
Author(s) -
Amegashie J. Atsu
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
economic inquiry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.823
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1465-7295
pISSN - 0095-2583
DOI - 10.1111/ecin.12860
Subject(s) - contest , incentive , index (typography) , economics , quality (philosophy) , citation , microeconomics , rent seeking , mathematical economics , political science , computer science , law , philosophy , epistemology , politics , world wide web
I consider a contest between scholars on the basis of three popular indices of citation. There exist equilibria in which there are more and better‐quality papers in the total citations contest than in the h ‐index contest. In some cases, the total citations contest yields the same quality of papers but more papers than the Euclidean contest. As the cost of writing a paper increases,the h ‐index is inferior to the total citations index in both the quality and quantity of papers. This result is partly driven by how the number of papers constrains how the h ‐index counts citations. ( JEL D72)