Referee Strategy (jru-referee-strategy)

When to trigger

• The draft is nearly done and you want to pre-empt the objections a JRU referee will raise
• You are choosing what to put in the main text vs. the appendix to disarm predictable pushback
• The paper makes a strong EU-vs-alternatives claim and you expect a referee from the camp it challenges
• You suspect the elicitation or the VSL identification has a soft spot a specialist will find

Who reviews for JRU, and what they hunt for

JRU's reviewer pool is specialized — decision theorists, experimental risk researchers, and VSL/insurance empiricists, under a single-blind model typical of Springer econ journals (待核实). Each subculture has a signature objection. Wargame the report by reading the paper as each of these referees would.

How to wargame

1. Assign the paper to its two most likely referee types and write their harshest one-paragraph objection each.
2. For every objection, decide: already answered (point to the section), answerable with existing data (add an exhibit), or a genuine limitation (state it candidly).
3. Move the evidence that disarms the top objection into the main text — do not leave your best defense in an appendix the referee may skim.
4. Pre-write the limitations paragraph: the objections you cannot fully resolve, stated before the referee does.
5. Hand off to jru-submission once the predictable objections are either answered or openly conceded.

The questions a JRU report almost always asks

Regardless of referee type, certain questions recur in this journal's reports. Have an answer ready for each:

• What exactly does your model predict that expected utility does not? — the single most common decision-theory probe.
• How do you separate utility curvature from probability weighting (or risk from ambiguity)? — the measurement probe.
• Is the elicitation incentive-compatible, and under what assumptions? — the experimental probe.
• Does the headline parameter survive a different functional form? — the methods probe.
• For VSL/insurance: is the effect a preference, or a belief / selection artifact? — the empirical probe.

If any of these has no crisp answer in the main text, fix the paper before the referee writes the report.

Worked second pass: choosing what to promote

After wargaming, rank the objections by lethality and move the one analysis that defuses the most lethal objection into a numbered main-text result, not a robustness footnote. A referee who finds the decisive check in Appendix C may still write "the authors do not address X" simply because they did not reach it. Promotion is cheap insurance in a single-blind specialist process where the referee's first impression carries weight.

Checklist

• The two most likely referee types are named and their sharpest objection written out
• The decision-theorist's "no behavioral content" objection is pre-empted
• The experimentalist's incentive-compatibility / u-vs-w objection is pre-empted
• The EU-loyalist alternative explanation is addressed with a discriminating prediction
• For VSL/insurance: selection and publication-selection objections are met
• The best defense lives in the main text, not an appendix
• A candid limitations paragraph states what cannot be resolved

Suggesting and excluding reviewers

In a small specialist pool the reviewer suggestions carry weight:

• Suggest scholars who work on your exact primitive and method, including some who might disagree but would review fairly — a credible suggestion list signals you know the field.
• Exclude only genuine conflicts (advisors, recent coauthors, direct rivals with a stake) and say why briefly; a long exclusion list reads as fear of scrutiny.
• Anticipate that the editor may still pick a referee from the camp your paper challenges — write the paper to survive that draw, do not try to route around it.

Anti-patterns

• Writing only for a friendly referee and ignoring the camp the paper challenges
• Leaving the decisive robustness check in the appendix where a skimming referee misses it
• Treating "a referee might dislike non-EU" as unanswerable instead of giving EU its fair test
• Hiding a known limitation and hoping no specialist notices — they will
• Generic "reviewer 2" cynicism instead of mapping objections to this journal's actual subcultures

Worked vignette (illustrative)

A CPT-based experiment expects two referees: a decision theorist and an EU loyalist. The theorist's objection — "your reference point is chosen to fit" — is pre-empted by fixing it to the status quo a priori and showing the fit is not improved by freeing it. The loyalist's objection — "risk-averse EU with pessimism does the same" — is met by a treatment that varies probabilities at fixed outcomes, producing the inverse-S weighting that EU cannot generate. Both defenses are promoted into the main text before submission.

Output format

【Journal】Journal of Risk and Uncertainty
【Skill】jru-referee-strategy
【Verdict】defensible / patch / concede
【Likely referees】<two types>
【Top objection】<one paragraph> → answered / addable / limitation
【Best defense location】main text [Y/N]
【Limitations stated】[Y/N]
【Source status】verified / 待核实 / not asserted
【Next skill】jru-submission