Contribution Cycles and Preferable Incentive Schemes

This note considers a situation in which the publisher of an academic journal seeks to maintain the number of contributions to the journal by subsidizing the contributors with some incentive payments. We show that under the incentive payment scheme that distributes some pre−determined total amount of payments equally to each contributor (the constant total payment scheme), the number of contributions can fluctuate cyclically as well as chaotically over time when the potential contributors form adaptive expectations. Numerical simulations suggest, among other things, that the performance of the constant total payment scheme may be more efficient than the constant per−capita payment scheme when the total amount of payments is supposed to be small.

研究ノート (Note)