Abstract
We evaluate policies to increase prosocial behavior using a field experiment with 1,500 referees at the Journal of Public Economics. We randomly assign referees to four groups: a control group with a six-week deadline to submit a referee report; a group with a four-week deadline; a cash incentive group rewarded with $100 for meeting the four-week deadline; and a social incentive group in which referees were told that their turnaround times would be publicly posted. We obtain four sets of results. First, shorter deadlines reduce the time referees take to submit reports substantially. Second, cash incentives significantly improve speed, especially in the week before the deadline. Cash payments do not crowd out intrinsic motivation: after the cash treatment ends, referees who received cash incentives are no slower than those in the four-week deadline group. Third, social incentives have smaller but significant effects on review times and are especially effective among tenured professors, who are less sensitive to deadlines and cash incentives. Fourth, all the treatments have little or no effect on rates of agreement to review, quality of reports, or review times at other journals. We conclude that small changes in journals' policies could substantially expedite peer review at little cost. More generally, price incentives, nudges, and social pressure are effective and complementary methods of increasing prosocial behavior.
Highlights
The peer review process familiar to all academic researchers offers a classic example of the positive externalities from prosocial behavior: the reviewer bears the costs from submitting a highquality referee report quickly, while the gains to the authors of the paper and to society from the knowledge produced are potentially large
We evaluate the impacts of economic and social incentives on peer review using an experiment with 1,500 referees at the Journal of Public Economics
We randomly assign referees to four groups: a control group with a sixweek (45 day) deadline to submit a referee report, a group with a four week (28 day) deadline, a cash incentive group rewarded with $100 for meeting a four week deadline, and a social incentive group in which referees were told that their turnaround times would be publicly posted
Summary
The sample includes all referees who received invitations sent between February 15, 2010 and May 9, 2011 (the period when the cash reward was offered) and submitted a report. Standard errors are reported in parentheses and the p-values are for hypothesis tests analogous to those in Panel A. Notes: This table reports summary statistics for referee invitations sent between February 15, 2010 and May 9, 2011, the time period when the cash reward was offered. The first section of the table shows the fraction of referee requests that were accepted. The second section reports statistics for the subsample of referee requests that were accepted. The third section of the table reports statistics on the referees who accepted the invitation and for whom the relevant information is available. See Appendix C for the definitions of the variables used in this table
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