| Abstract: |
There are several empirical studies of ex post analysis of citations in
academia. There is no ex ante analysis of citations. I consider a
game-theoretic model of a contest between scholars on the basis of two
widely-used measures of citations (i.e., the ℎ-index and total citation count)
and the newly-developed Euclidean index (Perry and Reny, American Economic
Review, 2016). I find equilibria in which there are more and better-quality
papers in the total citations contest than in the ℎ-index contest. When the
marginal cost of effort is constant, the scholars are indifferent between the
number of papers and the quality of papers in the total citations contest but
prefer quality of papers in the Euclidean contest although the total number of
citations is the same in both contests. In some cases, the total citations
contest yields the same quality of papers but more papers than the Euclidean
contest, a result which holds when the marginal cost of effort is increasing
but is not possible when the marginal cost of effort is constant. Consistent
with previous empirical results, I find that as the cost of writing a paper
increases, the ℎ-index is inferior to the total citations index in both the
quality and quantity of papers. This result is driven by how the cost of
effort constrains the number of papers that a scholar can write and how the
number of papers, in turn, constrains how the ℎ-index counts citations. |