Sergey Popov, Cardiff University

"Tactical Refereeing"

Abstract

Peer review is ubiquitous in hiring, promotion, and evaluation decisions, in academia and beyond. It is usually conducted to allocate limited resources, such as the funder's budget. I show that with limited capacity, peer review might lead to negatively biased evaluations precisely because approving a peer's worthy project lowers the chance that your own project will not get approved. As the pool of authors increases, ex-ante chances of approval following the refereeing process converges to the relative capacity irrespective of the chance of the candidate to be worthy, as long as the capacity binds. Monetary remuneration for getting things published encourages the negative bias.

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