DecentPeeR: A Self-Incentivised & Inclusive Decentralized Peer Review System

TL;DR

DecentPeeR introduces a decentralized peer review system that incentivizes virtuous reviewing and authorship behavior across multiple venues by tracking efforts and ensuring self-incentivization, promoting integrity in scholarly publishing.

Contribution

The paper presents DecentPeeR, a novel system that incentivizes honest peer review and authorship across venues without relying on physical rewards or assuming correlated qualities.

Findings

DecentPeeR achieves a Nash equilibrium rewarding virtuous behavior.

The system effectively tracks user efforts across multiple venues.

It promotes self-incentivized, honest peer review practices.

Abstract

Peer review, as a widely used practice to ensure the quality and integrity of publications, lacks a well-defined and common mechanism to self-incentivize virtuous behavior across all the conferences and journals. This is because information about reviewer efforts and author feedback typically remains local to a single venue, while the same group of authors and reviewers participate in the publication process across many venues. Previous attempts to incentivize the reviewing process assume that the quality of reviews and papers authored correlate for the same person, or they assume that the reviewers can receive physical rewards for their work. In this paper, we aim to keep track of reviewing and authoring efforts by users (who review and author) across different venues while ensuring self-incentivization. We show that our system, DecentPeeR, incentivizes reviewers to behave according to the rules, i.e., it has a unique Nash equilibrium in which virtuous behavior is rewarded.