A0884
Title: Rewarding academic journals publications: Efficient mechanisms and empirical assessment
Authors: Wojciech Charemza - Vistula University (Poland) [presenting]
Michal Lewandowski - Institute of Econometrics SGH Warsaw School of Economics (Poland)
Lukasz Wozny - Department of Quantitative Economics SGH Warsaw School of Economics (Poland)
Abstract: The efficiency of the mechanism of incentivising publications in academic journals by a system of points (or stars) awarded for quality publications is considered. It is assumed that the research supervision body wants to maximise the expected prestige of the aggregate of academic disciplines. It constructs the reward system in such a way that researchers, who each aim to maximise their reward, maximise, through their publication allocation decisions, the objective function of the research supervision body. The main assumptions are that (i) the marginal probabilities of papers acceptance are known; (ii) the conditional probabilities of acceptance and their research types are known to the researchers, but not to the supervision body and (iii), the types are modelled by beta distribution. Building on principal-agent literature with hidden types, we construct a parsimonious theoretical framework allowing to characterise efficient rewarding mechanisms. The main results are (i) the minimal set of assumptions for monotone journal submission strategies, (ii) conditions for optimal journal categorisation and (iii) monotone comparative statics of the optimal journal categorisation wrt shifts of researchers types/abilities. The model is calibrated to the settings of the reward scheme introduced within the Polish higher education reform in 2018.
