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

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