The Publication Choice Problem

Researchers strategically choose where to submit their work in order to maximize its impact, and these publication decisions in turn determine venues’ impact factors. To analyze how individual publication choices both respond to and shape venue impact, we introduce a game-theoretic framework—coined the Publication Choice Problem—that captures this two‐way interplay. We show the existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium in the Publication Choice Problem and its uniqueness under binary researcher types. Our characterizations of the equilibrium properties offer insights about what publication behaviors better indicate a researcher's impact level and reveal how the disproportionate scaling of high-impact and low-impact researchers can result in the fluctuation in the impact of publication venues. Through equilibrium analysis, we further investigate how labeling top papers with "spotlight" affects the impact factor of venues in the research community.