Academic Research and the Strategic Interaction of Scholars and Editors: A Two-Stage Game

This paper presents a two-stage game in order to explore the strategic interaction between the editor of an academic journal and a representative scholar. At the outset of the game, the editor chooses the “characteristics” of the journal, which encompass its rejection rate and other facets of the journal’s profile. Next, the scholar decides whether or not to submit a paper to the journal. We show that scholars’ behavior precludes the possibility of low-quality journals. As such, editors have only the choice between managing high-quality journals with few issues or second-tier journals publishing many papers. Moreover, if our two-stage game suggests that higher costs for scholars contribute to journal quality, numerical simulation shows that the effect of these costs on journal quality may be low. Lastly, our game-theoretic approach points out that it is difficult for journal editors to define optimal rejection rates.