Like many other journals in economics and other disciplines, the Economic Journal, the main scholarly organ of the Royal Economic Society, has paid referees (judges of submitted scholarly papers) for prompt reports (e.g., the American Economic Review offers $100 for a prompt report).
The purpose of this is to provide an incentive to get the job done quickly. I have long felt that the policy has only a marginal effect, and have even demonstrated that my supposition is correct. The main effect of the AER‘s incentive was to induce those who would have just missed the deadline for claiming the reward to get the job done a few weeks earlier. The really delinquent referees were unaffected.
Perhaps in recognition of the problems with small rewards, the EJ has abolished them and will instead be offering 10 prizes of £500 each year for the best referee reports. Whether this will work depends on how capable economists are at getting their acts together to win what is a fairly small prize (at least to most people in this well-paid profession), and on their degree of risk aversion toward this very risky gamble. Given past evidence, I would be happy to bet that this new incentive does very little to speed up the editorial process.
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It is always interesting to see that we economists are not good at applying incentives in their own domain. I doubt that small rewards will speed up the process. Also punishments are not suitable, since they might only perceived as a fee for submitting a late report. Probably the best way is to somehow appeal to the “ego”, as already mentioned.
The refereeing systems works because it is based on norms and reciprocity and of course because it is not completely anonymous. Editors should take these into account when providing incentives….
you began with a question. How to speed up economists? Incentive seems right. A reward for getting the job done within a timely manner and no reward if you don’t. But that leaves open the criteria question. The claim is that norms are operative. I wonder about this and especially about who benefits? One of the last interesting articles that I read from a refereed journal came out years ago- by Dennis Wrong- Another by Tom Gieryn is more recent. I have read and re-read these articles over the years. How many articles are published of this caliber in refereed journals? And why not? Have poignant articles not been submitted or are they being excluded? I don’t know the answer to this question.
Having been burned on applying for refereed grants on several occasions and one in which the grantee said –basically– I wish I could, but the decision was not mine to make– the incentive is weak to send a paper to any journal where an old boys network is operative. Why bother?
great job on the research. Thanks
What about the prize being a period with no referee reports and the punishment being an increase in the arrival or reports? This, plus some upper bound on the number of “accumulated reports out of deadline” or something, after which the economist in question is banished from publishing in this journal.