The Review Process in Economics: Is it Too Fast?

Rewards for publications in good economics journals are very high, while submission fees and other monetary costs associated with submitting an existing manuscript are low. Consequently, the editorial delay (especially the first response time – the time until the first editorial decision), by postponing monetary rewards to publication, constitutes the major submission cost (from the author’s perspective). Reducing the delay will induce many additional submissions of low-quality papers to good journals, increasing significantly the workload of editors and referees. Moreover, the rejection rate will increase and cause papers to be rejected more times prior to publication, offsetting at least some of the shorter first response times. As a result, the efforts of many editors to reduce the editorial delay, while attracting more submissions to their journals, may have adverse effects from a social perspective, and the optimal delay might be longer than the current average of four months.Review process, refereeing, publishing, academia, research, first response times, academic review process

Who Do We Tip and Why? An Empirical Investigation

An important question about social norms is whether they are created to increase welfare; I address it by examining the characteristics of tipped and non-tipped occupations. Tipping prevalence is negatively correlated with worker’s income and consumer’s monitoring ability and positively with consumer’s income and closeness between the worker and the consumer. The results refute a common belief that tipping exists to improve economic efficiency by lowering monitoring costs. Tipping, however, is more prevalent when consumers feel empathy and compassion for workers and want to show gratitude for good service, suggesting that tipping might increase welfare if welfare includes psychological utility.Tipping, Service industries, social norms, social welfare, behavioral economics, feelings, emotions

What sustains social norms and how they evolve? The case of tipping

The paper presents a model of the evolution of social norms. When a norm is costly to follow and people do not derive benefits from following it except for avoiding social disapproval, the norm erodes over time. Tip percentages, however, increased over the years, suggesting that people derive benefits from tipping, such as impressing others and improving their self-image as being generous and kind. The implications to the norm of not cooperating with new workers who accept lower wages are discussed; the model suggests that incumbent workers have reasons to follow this norm in addition to avoiding social disapproval.Tipping; Social norms; Evolution; Conformist transmission; Conformity

The implications of tipping for economics and management

Tipping is a phenomenon that illustrates the importance of social norms and psychological reasons in motivating economic behavior. People tip because this is the social norm and disobeying norms results in psychological disutility. Tipping is also economically important: in the United States alone, millions of workers derive most of their income from tips, and annual tips amount to dozens of billions of dollars. Tipping is also prevalent in numerous other countries around the globe. While tipping has been studied extensively by psychologists, it received very little attention from economists. To encourage other economists to research this interesting phenomenon, I discuss the implications of tipping for several areas in economics: social economics, behavioral economics, labor economics, and economics of information / management strategy. I provide many ideas for future research both as part of the discussion and in a concluding section.tipping; social-economics; behavioral-economics; social-norms; hospitality-industry; restaurants

Relative Thinking Theory

The article presents a theory that I denote “Relative Thinking Theory,” which claims that people consider relative differences and not only absolute differences when making various economics decisions, even in those cases where the rational model dictates that people should consider only absolute differences. The article reviews experimental evidence for this behavior, summarizing briefly several experiments I conducted, as well as some earlier related literature. It then discusses how we can think about relative thinking and formalize this behavior. Later, the article addresses several related questions: why do people exhibit relative thinking, whether it is beneficial to do so, and whether experience and education can change relative thinking. Finally, the article explains why firms seem to respond to relative thinking of consumers, and raises additional implications of relative thinking for economics and management.Relative thinking, relative differences, behavioral decision making, behavioral economics, psychological economics, Weber's law, absolute differences, percentages, ratios

The Effect of External Incentives on Profits and Firm-Provided Incentives Strategy

The article examines the firm's choice of incentives when workers face additional incentives (“external incentives”) to those provided by the firm, such as building reputation that improves the workers' prospects with other employers, or satisfaction from working well. Surprisingly, the firm might find it optimal to increase the incentives it provides following an increase in external incentives. Even if the firm reduces its incentives, however, total incentives unambiguously increase, leading to higher effort and profits. This implies that firms should try to increase the external incentives that their workers face; I suggest several ways firms can do so.Worker satisfaction; Personnel economics; External incentives; Worker reputation; Intrinsic motivation

Behavioral industrial organization, firm strategy, and consumer economics

The field of behavioral economics is one of the fastest-growing fields in economics in recent years. Not long ago this was a small field, but over the last decade or so, the field gained more recognition, and today it seems clear that psychological motivations and biases affect economic behavior in many important ways. Insights from psychology were incorporated in several areas of economics. This paper offers a short review of the application of behavioral economics to industrial organization, which can be denoted “behavioral industrial organization,” and on the relationship between behavioral industrial organization, firm strategy, and consumer economics.industrial organization; behavioral economics; strategy; firm strategy; business strategy; economic psychology; behavioral industrial organization; consumer behavior; consumer economics

Citing reprinted material

Journal articles are sometimes later reprinted as chapters of edited books. The question whether citations of this material should mention the book or the journal has significant implications. I describe several advantages of citing the journal: it allows the readers to locate the material more easily and to handle it more conveniently (when it is available electronically); it gives a better signal about how important and updated the material is; and it gives the journal proper credit, which is important because journals are ranked based on citations. Finally, several reasons for citing the book are also discussed.Citing; Citations; Edited volumes; Collective volumes; Reprinted articles; Professional ethics; Professional standards; Academic writing; Edited books; Journals; Journal impact

The effect of relative thinking on firm strategy and market outcomes: A location differentiation model with endogenous transportation costs

Consumers often have to decide whether to go to a remote store for a lower price. Only the absolute price difference between the stores should be relevant in this case, but several experiments showed that people exhibit "relative thinking": they are affected also by the relative savings (relative to the good's price). This article analyzes the effects of this bias on firm strategy and market outcomes using a two-period game-theoretic model of location differentiation. Relative thinking causes consumers to make less effort to save a constant amount when they buy more expensive goods. In the location differentiation context this behavior can be modeled by consumers who behave as if their transportation costs are an increasing function of the good's price. This gives firms an additional incentive to raise prices, in order to increase the perceived transportation costs of consumers, which consequently softens competition and allows higher profits. Therefore, the response of firms to relative thinking raises prices and profits and reduces consumer surplus, in both periods. Total welfare is unchanged in the first period, and in the second period it is either unchanged or reduced, depending on whether the objective or subjective transportation costs are used to compute welfare. The main results of the model (firms' response to relative thinking increases prices and reduces consumer surplus) are likely to hold also in the context of search. The article also explains why "relative thinking" is a more appropriate term than "mental accounting" (which was often used before) to describe this behavior, and discusses why people might exhibit relative thinking.Competitive Strategy; Relative Thinking; Pricing; Mental Accounting; Consumer Psychology; Consumer Attitudes & Behavior; Cognitive Processes; Behavioral Decision Making; Industrial Organization; Product Differentiation

Evolution of social norms with heterogeneous preferences: A general model and an application to the academic review process

The article presents a model of social norm evolution, which suggests how the increase in optimal and actual first response times (FRT) of economics journals can be related. When the optimal FRT and the norm about how much time refereeing should take increase, it seems that the existence of a norm increases the average refereeing time. The model suggests the surprising result that this is not necessarily true. I also discuss applications of the model in other contexts, differences in the optimal FRT between disciplines, the effects of the FRT on the tenure process, and strategic behavior of referees.social norms; evolution; first response times; refereeing; academic publishing; turnaround times; journals; review process