ICRA versus AAMAS acceptance rates

Although down from its early very high acceptance rates, the premier robotics conference, ICRA, accepts about 40% of submitted papers (43% in 2009). This is nearly double the AAMAS acceptance rate and about double the acceptance rate of other major AI conferences (IJCAI is in the teens).

ICRA is a large conference, much bigger than AAMAS and similar in size to IJCAI (the Grandaddy of AI conferences.) It has more than five times the number of presentations than AAMAS and three times as many oral presentations as IJCAI.

There are clearly different philosophies of the different organizing committees: ICRA accepts more papers, has a bigger conference, AAMAS and IJCAI accept less papers, limiting the conference size (since, overwhelmingly, relatively few people attend a conference where they do not have a paper).

The question is which is a better approach for advancing science (admittedly, only one of several reasons for conferences).

A bigger conference lets more people get together and discuss, possibly advancing science faster than the smaller conferences. The counter argument is that the smaller conferences are higher quality and therefore advance science more efficiently.

From a game theory perspective, I would imagine that the more selective conferences have even higher relative quality than the acceptance rates suggest, because authors only submit high quality work.

Perhaps both work for their respective fields. Robotics is a slightly younger field, with lots of ideas to be vetted, while AI is general is a bit more mature. The big robotics conference lets lots of ideas in, the smaller AI conferences efficiently cut out some of the noise.

I am not sure there is a right or wrong answer.