The author–editor game

Abstract

This paper provides a formal study on manuscript quality control in peer review. Within this analysis, a biased editor is defined operationally as an editor that exerts a higher (lower) level of quality control. Here we show that if the editor is more biased than the manuscript's author then the author undertakes the type of revision that the editor prefers instead of following his or her own opinion. Moreover, authors with a strong belief about the required level of quality control will be very motivated under editors who agree with them. By contrast, when authors do not undertake the revision type that the editor prefers, they will be very demotivated under editors that exert a different level of quality control and more so as the associate editor is more biased. The effects of editors' bias on authors' satisfaction and motivation cause sorting in the authors who submit manuscripts to scholarly journals, and therefore, match authors and journals with similar quality standards. It will decrease the demotivating effect that editors' bias had on some authors, so that bias becomes more effective at the peer review stage. Moreover, some journals will be forced to lower the quality standards in order to be able to compete with journals of more biased editors. This paper also shows that, under fairly weak conditions, it is optimal for the Editor-in-Chief to assign manuscripts to an editor that exerts a quality control higher than the journal's standard, against the competing journal whose editor holds the journal's standard.