arXiv subjects

Johan Fourie

Publications and source records attributed to Johan Fourie.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The Price of Submission

Economics journals ration access to peer review with time and money. A July 2026 census of 500 RePEc-ranked economics journals accepting unsolicited submissions finds that 113 (22.6 per cent) charge a fee, with incidence falling from 68 per cent in the top 50 to 2 per cent in the bottom 50. A sequential-submission model shows that waiting pays part of the capacity-clearing price, leaving the fee as a residual. Because rejected manuscripts move down the ranking, a fee reduces system-wide referee demand only when authors stop, shorten their submission chains or switch to journals requiring fewer reports.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

AI and the Research Team

Artificial intelligence is associated with larger research teams, yet in mathematics, among the most codifiable fields, individual researchers working with AI now produce research-grade results. A span-of-control model reconciles these observations. AI lowers execution cost, which expands laboratory scale, and automates codifiable tasks, which lowers the member share of each unit. Team size is therefore quasi-concave in AI capability, with at most one peak. The model predicts that a fully codifiable team peaks when effective automation coverage reaches a closed-form threshold, typically near complete coverage, and, among fields with shared primitives that possess an interior peak, those with less irreducibly human task content peak first. Under explicit priors, the 90 percent forecast intervals for the fully codifiable peak span 2026 to 2030.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

A Gate-and-Menu Theory of Collective Tourism Brand Value

A collective tourism brand is jointly produced by assets managed by different custodians, so destination managers must decide which assets require collective protection. We model a destination as a gate times a menu. The gate combines essential inputs and non-reproducible anchors as a weaker-link public good; the menu combines many reproducible attractions through love of variety. Deterioration of a binding gate element has a non-vanishing, brand-wide effect, whereas an individual menu attraction's share vanishes as the menu grows. Aumann-Shapley accounting allocates the jointly produced brand value across assets. Under stated surplus and non-use-value conditions, a decentralized custodian weakly under-maintains physical gate quality holding other qualities fixed. We measure the framework's constructs from guide text with two language models across 166 economies, subject the gate labels to a partial external check against the World Heritage List, and illustrate a within-brand contamination ordering with four French wine regions.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

The Value of Peer Review and the Reward to Reputation

Journals cannot referee every paper they receive. When submissions outrun the time reviewers can give, an editor must decide what to do with the papers no one reads: reject them, or check them with a faster but less accurate tool, of the kind artificial intelligence now supplies. A paper the tool passes carries the same public stamp as one an expert approved, and readers cannot tell a screened paper from a reviewed one. This paper asks which choice makes the stamp more valuable. Rejecting the unread papers keeps the approved pool cleaner, because the faster tool sometimes passes weak work. Yet rejection can make the stamp worth less: good papers turned away unread join the pool of unstamped papers and raise the quality against which a stamped paper is judged. Which effect wins depends on how common good work is, and the model gives the exact switching point when there is one. The choice also shifts how much a strong affiliation is worth; and once authors can run the screening tool themselves, wherever some game it and some do not, the stamp's value is set by what getting past the screen costs, not by what the screen detects, while expert judgment allows no such gaming.

econ.GN↗