Conservatism and Representativeness Heuristic in Peer Reviews: Evidence from the Finance Literature 1946-2020

Abstract

This paper explores whether journal referees take into account the author’s scholarly credentials in their decisions using the stochastic process underlying the Yule-Simon distribution as a descriptive model of the peer-review process. We provide evidence that referees consider the author’s publication record valuable information in their decision-making, and such referee behavior helps improve the efficacy of the peer-review process. We show that the probability that a newly accepted paper in a given journal is written by authors with no prior publications is lower for top journals, specialty journals, journals with higher Eigenfactor or Article Influence Score, and journals with more publications.

Keywords: Bibliometrics, Peer review, Conservatism bias, Representativeness bias, Yule-Simon distribution

JEL Classification: A14, C00, C46, G00, G40, J24