Conservatism and Representativeness Heuristic in Peer Reviews : Evidence from the Finance Literature 1946-2020

We employ the stochastic process underlying the Yule-Simon distribution as a descriptive model of conservatism and the representativeness heuristic in the peer-review process and test its prescriptive power. The observed distribution of the proportion of authors by the number of papers is virtually identical to the Yule-Simon distribution. The probability that a newly accepted paper in a given journal is written by authors with no prior publication is lower for top journals, specialty journals, journals with higher Eigenfactor or Article Influence Score, and journals with more publications. We discuss whether conservatism and the representativeness heuristic help improve editorial decisions