Buying the Right to Monitor:Editorial Design in AI-Assisted Peer Review
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866908993888190464 |
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| author | Hakobyan, Zaruhi |
| author_facet | Hakobyan, Zaruhi |
| contents | Generative AI acts as a disruptive technological shock to evaluative organizations. In academic peer review, it enters both sides of the market: authors use AI to polish submissions, and reviewers use it to generate plausible reports without exerting evaluative effort. We develop a three-sided equilibrium model to analyze this dual adoption and derive a counterintuitive managerial implication for journal policy. We show that when AI capability crosses a critical threshold, reviewer effort collapses discontinuously. This transition creates a welfare misalignment: authors benefit from a weakened ``rat race,'' while editors suffer from degraded signal informativeness. Characterizing the editor's optimal constrained response, we identify a strict policy reversal. Before the AI transition, editors should tighten acceptance standards to curb rent-dissipating author polishing. After the transition, conventional intuition fails: editors must loosen acceptance standards while investing in AI detection, because further tightening only amplifies dissipative polishing without improving sorting. We prove analytically that this sign reversal is a structural consequence of the reviewer effort collapse under log-concave quality distributions. Ultimately, addressing AI in evaluative systems requires treating monitoring and loosened selectivity as complementary design instruments. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_23645 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Buying the Right to Monitor:Editorial Design in AI-Assisted Peer Review Hakobyan, Zaruhi General Economics Economics Generative AI acts as a disruptive technological shock to evaluative organizations. In academic peer review, it enters both sides of the market: authors use AI to polish submissions, and reviewers use it to generate plausible reports without exerting evaluative effort. We develop a three-sided equilibrium model to analyze this dual adoption and derive a counterintuitive managerial implication for journal policy. We show that when AI capability crosses a critical threshold, reviewer effort collapses discontinuously. This transition creates a welfare misalignment: authors benefit from a weakened ``rat race,'' while editors suffer from degraded signal informativeness. Characterizing the editor's optimal constrained response, we identify a strict policy reversal. Before the AI transition, editors should tighten acceptance standards to curb rent-dissipating author polishing. After the transition, conventional intuition fails: editors must loosen acceptance standards while investing in AI detection, because further tightening only amplifies dissipative polishing without improving sorting. We prove analytically that this sign reversal is a structural consequence of the reviewer effort collapse under log-concave quality distributions. Ultimately, addressing AI in evaluative systems requires treating monitoring and loosened selectivity as complementary design instruments. |
| title | Buying the Right to Monitor:Editorial Design in AI-Assisted Peer Review |
| topic | General Economics Economics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23645 |