Comparative statistics on the discussion process.
Table notes: Comparison of some discussion statistics between two groups of papers (Looking closer at the most relevant parameters, we first focus on Rows 2 and 4 of that compare mean overall scores (the overall score takes integer values from 1 to 6 where larger values indicate higher quality) given by reviewers in the initial reviews, that is, before reviewers got to see the other reviews and the author feedback. Interestingly, mean initial scores given by reviewers who participate in the discussion (Row 4) appear to be lower than mean scores computed over all reviewers (Row 2), suggesting that those who give lower scores are more active in discussing papers (see also Rows 8 and 9). However, there is no significant difference between two groups of papers (Next, the activity of reviewers with the most positive (respectively, negative) initial opinion in the discussion (Rows 8 and 9) is similar across the two groups of papers. This observation supports the intuition that our treatment scheme does not introduce a difference across conditions in the distributions of reviewers who participate in the discussion. Finally, we note that most of the papers used in the experiment had some discussion (Row 5). Specifically, we see that the mean number of participants in a paper’s discussion and the length of a paper’s discussion is similar across the two conditions, where we measure the length as the number of messages in a paper’s discussion thread (Rows 6 and 7). With this observation, we conclude this section and note that data reported in 