Can Editors Compensate for the “Luck of the Reviewer Draw” Effect in Peer Review? An Agent-Based Model

This paper investigates the impact of various editorial options of author/referee matching and referee behaviour for the quality and efficiency of peer review. We modelled the peer review process as an interaction of editors, authors and referees characterized by intrinsic knowledge asymmetry and subject to evaluation bias. We built various scenarios where referees could behave randomly or follow cheating strategies to outperform potential competitors and editors could use different strategies for referee selection. We also tested different ways through which referees classify authors as potential competitors. We found that there is no editorial best way for referee selection. In case of random behaviour of referees, any editorial option may have a negative effect. On the other hand, accurate matching by editors may reduce the negative effect of referee cheating and limit the effect of excessive competition.