Peer-review in a world with rational scientists: Toward selection of the average

One of the virtues of peer review is that it provides a self-regulating selection mechanism for scientific work, papers and projects. Peer review as a selection mechanism is hard to evaluate in terms of its efficiency. Serious efforts to understand its strengths and weaknesses have not yet lead to clear answers. In theory peer review works if the involved parties (editors and referees) conform to a set of requirements, such as love for high quality science, objectiveness, and absence of biases, nepotism, friend and clique networks, selfishness, etc. If these requirements are violated, what is the effect on the selection of high quality work? We study this question with a simple agent based model. In particular we are interested in the effects of rational referees, who might not have any incentive to see high quality work other than their own published or promoted. We find that a small fraction of incorrect (selfish or rational) referees can drastically reduce the quality of the published (accepted) scientific standard. We quantify the fraction for which peer review will no longer select better than pure chance. Decline of quality of accepted scientific work is shown as a function of the fraction of rational and unqualified referees. We show how a simple quality-increasing policy of e.g. a journal can lead to a loss in overall scientific quality, and how mutual support-networks of authors and referees deteriorate the system.Comment: 5 pages 4 figure

Arbitrariness in the peer review process

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the causes and effects of arbitrariness in the peer review process. This paper focuses on two main reasons for the arbitrariness in peer review. The first is that referees are not homogenous and display homophily in their taste and perception of innovative ideas. The second element is that reviewers are different in the time they allocate for peer review. Our model replicates the NIPS experiment of 2014, showing that the ratings of peer review are not robust, and that altering reviewers leads to a dramatic impact on the ranking of the papers. This paper also shows that innovative works are not highly ranked in the existing peer review process, and in consequence are often rejected. © 2020, The Author(s)

Entry, Growth and Patenting in Industrial Clusters: A Study of the Aerospace Industry in the UK

This paper studies how firm performance is influenced by the strength of the industrial cluster (or industrial district) in which it is located. The paper presents estimates of firm-level employment and patent growth models for a range of '5-digit' aerospace industries in the UK. In these models, employment in the firm's own sector and employment in other sectors is taken as a measure of the strength of the cluster. Strong positive clustering effects are found in many sectors, but nevertheless some clustering effects are negative. Entry into clusters of this industry is also examined and some sectors are found to attract new entry while others are only attracted.Industrial Clusters, Firm Performance, Innovation, Entry, Aerospace,