Search and research: the influence of editorial boards on journals’ quality

This paper considers the search for the best papers by the editors of an academic journal. At each period, each editor receives a set of submissions and has to decide which paper to accept. Some editors being more demanding than others, researchers choose the quality level of their papers taking as given the composition of the editorial board. According to the specific structures of the editorial board, various equilibria may appear. We show that the journal will publish a high number of high quality papers only when the editorial board is composed by a homogeneous set of very demanding editors. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012