brycewang-stanford Referee Strategy (jebo-referee-strategy)
When to trigger
- The draft is near-complete and you want to find the holes a referee will find first
- You suspect a referee will say "interesting, but it belongs in [sibling journal]"
- You cannot articulate why your behavioral mechanism beats the obvious alternative
- A coauthor wants to know which objections are fatal vs. addressable
- You are deciding what to add now vs. defend in the response letter
Who referees for JEBO
JEBO uses single-anonymized review (referees anonymous, authors named), typically two-plus referees after an editor screen (检索于 2026-06；以官网为准). The modal referee is a behavioral or experimental economist who has seen the closest prior experiment and is alert to the standard ways a behavioral claim can fail. Single-anonymized review means your name and prior work are visible — consistency with your own record and the relevant literature matters.
The objections JEBO referees raise most, and how to pre-empt
| Referee objection | Pre-empt before submitting |
|---|---|
| "This could be an experimenter-demand effect." | Build in a demand-effect bound/treatment; address it in the text, not only if asked. |
| "Your mechanism isn't separated from [rival channel]." | Add a moderation/mediation test the rival does not predict; name the alternative explicitly. |
| "It's a single lab task — does it generalize?" | State the external-validity scope; if possible, a field or alternative-pool replication. |
| "Significance, but is the effect meaningful?" | Report effect sizes in interpretable units; compare to a behavioral benchmark. |
| "Why JEBO and not ExpEcon / GEB / JEP?" | Make the behavioral-economics contribution (not the method or the psychology) the headline. |
| "Many comparisons, no correction." | Pre-register the primary outcome; report MHT-corrected results. |
| "Is this just a replication?" | If partly, frame the value-added honestly (new pool, moderator, contested-result confirmation). |
| "The model adds notation but no testable prediction." | Ensure the theory yields a pre-stated comparative static the data test. |
Triage: fatal vs. addressable
- Fatal if unaddressed before submission: deception in an incentivized study without justification; no demand-effect consideration; a confound that fully substitutes for the claimed mechanism; clear wrong-journal fit.
- Addressable now (cheap, do it): MHT correction, effect-size reporting, comprehension-pass subsample, balance/attrition tables, a falsification check.
- Defensible in the letter (if cost is high): an additional subject pool, a full structural extension — flag in limitations and offer in the response if requested.
Suggesting and excluding reviewers
Editorial Manager lets you suggest/oppose reviewers. Suggest scholars who know the literature but are not close collaborators (single-anonymized review makes obvious conflicts visible); a credible suggestion of the scholar who owns the closest prior result can help, since they will be invited anyway.
Checklist
- Each likely objection above has a pre-empt in the current draft or a planned response
- Experimenter-demand and mechanism-vs-alternative are addressed in the text, not only reactively
- External-validity scope is stated honestly
- Effect sizes are interpretable; not relying on significance alone
- The "why JEBO" answer is explicit and survives the sibling-journal test
- MHT/pre-registration handled for multi-arm/multi-outcome designs
- Reviewer suggestions/exclusions prepared with conflicts in mind
Anti-patterns
- Hoping the referee won't notice the demand-effect or rival-mechanism gap
- Answering "does it generalize?" with silence rather than a bounded scope statement
- Leaning on asterisks when asked whether the effect is meaningful
- Submitting a paper whose strongest fit is a sibling journal and hoping the editor disagrees
- Suggesting only friendly reviewers (transparent under single-anonymized review)
- Deferring cheap, obviously-required checks to "if the referee asks"
Output format
【Review model】single-anonymized; ~2+ referees after editor screen
【Top 3 anticipated objections】
1. <objection> → <pre-empt: in-text now / planned response>
2. ...
3. ...
【Fatal-if-unaddressed】<list>
【Why-JEBO answer】<one sentence surviving sibling test>
【Reviewer suggestions/exclusions】<prepared>
【Next step】jebo-submission