Who volunteers to review proposals for the AIR Forum, and why?

So I am right now at AIR and the conference is wrapping up. Presentation went well and though I didn’t cover as much as I wanted, got some great feedback and was hopefully helpful for some folks.

And a few conversations with other folks who are presenting and the actual ones I have attended got me thinking about this – who decides which sessions the conference’s 1,700-plus attendees spend their time in? About 200 AIR members volunteered to review and score submitted proposals, with each submission receiving multiple independent reads. A separate committee then worked through all the recommendations to make a final selection.

But here’s the thing about peer review, because it’s a voluntary and largely thankless service, the first question I want to ask as an economist isn’t who is showing up, but why.

Why offer free labor?

Reviewing conference proposals (and peer-reviewed journal articles, though things are changing slowly on this front) is a largely unpaid and somewhat time-consuming affair. You spend several days reading abstracts and proposals, scoring rubrics, writing comments that the submitters may never see, and deciding whose work deserves a platform and dissemination to a wider audience. You get no credit. You are unlikely to put this on your CV. You don’t even necessarily get to attend the session you scored highly – those sessions might conflict with others you’d want to see, or as it happened for me, scheduled at the same time you’re presenting.

Economists have been seeking explanations for seemingly freely offered volunteer behavior, albeit in slightly different contexts for decades now. Lerner and Tirole’s work on open source software is the first thing that comes to mind – they highlighted how labor economics can explain the behavior of people who contribute skilled work for free to shared projects. Their work identified four similar, and sometimes overlapping, motivations. I think all four are relevant in explaining why an institutional researcher would spend several days scoring AIR Forum proposals.

Personal enjoyment and intrinsic satisfaction. Sometimes we enjoy things for their own sake – a complex puzzle, reading for fun. Lakhani and Wolf (2005) found that intrinsic motivation, essentially how creative a person feels when working on a project, is the strongest driver of voluntary contribution, stronger than reputation incentives and twice as strong as receiving a salary. For a conference reviewer, this translates directly: reading and scoring 10–12 proposals about IR practice is, for the right person, genuinely interesting.

Signaling and career advantages. Lerner and Tirole distinguished two forms of delayed reward that voluntary participation can bring – one related to future job offers and professional advancement, the other stemming from a desire for peer recognition. Both are stronger when the work is visible to an audience the contributor wants to impress. Reviewing proposals is visible in the right circles because colleagues know who’s on the list, and a reputation for good editorial judgment can build social capital that accumulates over time.

Learning and skill development. The economics literature finds that improving skill was the second most common motivation reported by voluntary contributors. For IR professionals, reviewing proposals is genuinely educational. Getting a sneak peek at what peers across 200 institutions are working on gives you a panoramic view of the field’s current work before attending a single session.

Community identity and norms. The open source literature draws on social theory to argue that these communities are driven by norms of peer review as a social mechanism, reputation-building and gift-giving being the two facets. Many professional communities, including AIR, operate on similar logic. Reviewing is a form of reciprocity – if you have submitted proposals and benefited from having your work evaluated by experienced practitioners, contributing in kind back to the community is how the system reproduces itself. It’s the professional equivalent of paying it forward – enforced and sustained through social norms rather than contracts.

Reviewers are the most engaged people in the room

These four motivations combine to explain not just why people review, but who ends up doing it. And that’s why it was important to understand the why first.

To volunteer as an AIR Forum reviewer, you need to be a current AIR member who has attended a prior Forum. This works well as a screening mechanism. It selects for people who are already deeply involved in the professional IR community, folks for whom some or all of the four motivations above are true. Maybe they find the work intrinsically engaging, or care about their standing in the field, or are investing in their own professional development. For some it’s the reciprocal obligation that comes from years of participating and presenting themselves.

The result is a reviewer pool that is, by construction, the more engaged segment of the AIR community. These are the people most likely to attend the Forum regardless of whether they’re presenting – genuinely interested in what is being discussed without necessarily an explicit reward in return. They are also a self-selected pool who have a view on what good IR work looks like, beliefs about what methodological approaches are credible, and what would be interesting for a wider audience to discover. This consensus, this screening… All of it shapes the program in ways that aren’t visible, but determine what the field treats as worth presenting and what it quietly turns away.

The math behind the numbers

For the 2026 Forum, I matched the full reviewer list against the presenter pool and computed institution-level metrics for both. The numbers breaks down like this:

• 49 institutions appear in both the presenter and reviewer pools
• 68 institutions are presenter-only — they submit and present, but don’t review
• 124 institutions are reviewer-only — they evaluate proposals but don’t present

That last number is what interested me the most. Now admittedly, I am conflating a presenter/reviewer’s home institution with the professional here, but it’s nice to see over a 100 institutions shape the program through reviewing without having a visible presence on the stage. I would at some point want to look at how many of those reviewing are past-presenters, and how many of them are never-presenters.

At the person level, 18.8% of 2026 reviewers also appeared as presenters – roughly only 1 in 5 reviewers are presenting, while 4 in 5 aren’t.

The 49 institutions in both pools — the ones doing both roles — tend to be the largest, most professionally embedded IR operations: Indiana University, Carnegie Mellon, Florida State, the University of Iowa, Stony Brook, Penn State. These are institutions where engagement with the AIR professional community is baked into the organizational culture, not treated as optional professional development. At those places, reviewing and presenting aren’t separate decisions — they’re part of the same institutional orientation toward the field.

Who reviews, who presents, and what that reveals

The 124 reviewer-only institutions are worth examining because they represent a specific professional profile: people embedded enough to volunteer time but not presenting their own work. Scan through the list and you find real range — tribal colleges, research universities, community colleges, small liberal arts schools. The reviewer pool is meaningfully more diverse in institution type than the presenter pool.

But this diversity operates within a structural constraint. The prerequisite of prior attendance selects for people whose institutions support conference travel consistently over time — which is itself a budget and culture signal. Institutions that send people to the Forum year after year are institutions where IR is treated as a professional practice worth sustained investment. That’s not uniformly distributed across higher education.

The 68 presenter-only institutions have a different profile. They’re often institutions where someone did compelling work and got it through the proposal process, but isn’t deeply enough embedded in the AIR community to have signed up for the reviewing apparatus. They’re participating in the market, so to speak, without contributing to the infrastructure that runs it.

Using Lerner and Tirole’s framework: presenter-only institutions are responding primarily to signaling incentives — they have work they want the field to see. Reviewer-only institutions are responding primarily to community identity and reciprocity norms. The 49 dual-role institutions are responding to all four motivations simultaneously, and they’re the ones who actually constitute the field’s core.

The person-level question

This analysis treats institutions as the unit of observation, which is the right frame for understanding professional geography. But the more interesting question is at the person level: which individuals are doing both roles, and what does their career trajectory look like? Within the 18.8% overlap between the reviewer and presenter pools lies the field’s most professionally active cohort — the people who are simultaneously shaping the program’s content, presenting their own work, and building the social capital that makes all of it possible.

A follow-up analysis tracking named individuals across years could reveal something interesting. For now, it appears that the reviewer pool consist of IR professionals who happen to care about quality and are the most engaged, most embedded, most invested segment of the field — the people for whom some of the four motivations to contribute free labor are in play. Understanding who decides what gets presented means understanding who has already decided, repeatedly and deliberately, that this community is worth investing in.

Rizwanur Rob is Assistant Director in the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment at Suffolk University. He is presenting “Measuring What Matters: A Program’s Financial Health” at the 2026 AIR Forum in Washington, D.C. This is the second of two posts on the AIR Forum presenters and reviwers.