The editor-manuscript game

Scientific journals receive an increasing number of submissions and many of them will be desk rejected without receiving detailed feedback from reviewers. In fact, the number of desk rejections has risen dramatically in the last decade. In this paper, we contribute to the literature by examining an editor’s incentives either to issue a desk decision that is based solely on their imperfect private information about the manuscript’s quality or to send the paper to external peer reviewers that better reveal its quality. In our model, without external review, the journal editor receives an informative but imperfect signal of the manuscript’s quality. We focus on the case in which editors may differ in their decision accuracy, and highlight the consideration that even an editor with the best expertise and the best intentions may be unable to reach a perfect assessment of the manuscript’s quality. In our baseline model, the journal editor is not driven by financial interests but is nevertheless impurely altruistic in that the editor has a reputation consideration that may be tied to authors’ observational learning of the editor’s decision pathway (i.e., the process to reach the eventual editorial decision, which may or may not involve external peer review). Also, the editor in our setting is imperfectly informed about the manuscript’s quality unless they send the manuscript out to review. Our paper shows that high-ability editors tend to send fewer papers to external review than they should as a way to signal their ability. This is so because external peer review and editor’s decision expertise may substitute for each other.