Quantity-Cum-Quality Contests

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Quantity-cum-Quality Contests Abstract I consider a contest in which the quantity of output is rewarded and another in which the quality of output is rewarded. The output in the quality contest plays a dual role. It counts in the quality contest but it is also converted into quantity-equivalent output to obtain total output in the quantity contest. This latter feature implies that the two contests are interlinked. Examples abound. There are contests in which there is a prize for the number (quantity) of publications by a scholar, a politician's accomplishments, an athlete's number of Olympic medals, etc and there is also a prize for a scholar's publications in top journals, a politician's major accomplishments, or an athlete's number of Olympic gold medals . I find that when the unit cost of producing quality is sufficiently high, then treating quality and quantity as the same has a disincentive effect on the production of quality. In contrast, when the unit cost of producing quality is sufficiently low, treating quality and quantity as the same has no disincentive effect on the production of quality. There is an equilibrium in which high-ability and low-ability contestants, in spite of being non-identical, have the same probability of winning the quantity contest. When contestants are budget-constrained, I find that whether an increase in the budget will increase effort in the quality contest depends on the size of the initial budget. Terms of use: Documents inJEL-Codes: D720.

Citations and Incentives in Academic Contests

“…Based on a similar observation in other fields (e.g., Seglen ; Verma ), the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessmen t recommends that journal‐based metrics such as journal impact factors should not be used “...as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist's contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.” But to the extent, as noted by Hamermesh (, 141), that “[a] very few outliers determine our perceptions of journal quality,” the incentive effects of total citation count identified here is plausible so long as we implicitly or explicitly weight citations in journals as in Amegashie () and Conley et al ().…”

“…A different but equivalent approach is to assume that a citation in the high‐quality journal is equivalent to r 1 / r 2 ≥ 1 citations in the low‐quality journal. This quality‐adjusted citation of Paper 1 relative to Paper 2 is akin to the approach in Amegashie (), Bodenhorn (), Conley et al (), and Kenny and Studley (). In this case, articles in high‐quality journals need not garner more citations than articles in low‐quality journals but citations in high‐quality journals are given a bigger weight.…”

“…Suppose, as in Amegashie (), that in addition to the total citations contest, there is also a quality contest based on only publication in the high‐quality journal. This contest has a prize, V > 0.…”

“…Thus, publishing in the high‐quality journal counts in both the total citations contest and the quality contest . Then if , there exists the Nash equilibrium (see Amegashie ):…”

“…This paper studies a contest in which two scholars compete on the basis of their scholarly citations. The contestants have the option of writing more than one paper and thus the contest has multiple dimensions of efforts as in Amegashie (, ), Epstein and Hefeker (), Rai and Sarin (2009), and Arbatskaya and Mialon ().…”