R&R Response & Rebuttal (pom-rebuttal)

When to trigger

• You received a POM R&R and have planned (or made) the revision
• You must reconcile conflicting referee demands for the Department Editor
• A later-round decision asks you to defend or further revise prior changes

Write the response letter after revising the manuscript, not before. Resubmit through ScholarOne (mc.manuscriptcentral.com/poms) to the same Department Editor where possible, and keep the revised main document within the 32-page cap — push heavy new material into the unlimited online e-companion.

Response-document structure

1. Opening letter to the Department Editor. Thank the editor and referees; summarize the most important changes in 2–4 sentences; state explicitly how you addressed the editor's stated priorities, including any practice-relevance concern. Note where referees conflicted and how you resolved it.
2. Per-referee sections. Restate every comment (verbatim or faithfully numbered), then respond.
3. Point-by-point format for each comment:
   • Comment (quoted/numbered)
   • Response (what you changed and the OM reasoning)
   • Location (main-paper section/table/figure and e-companion item)
   • Implication (how the change strengthens the theory and/or practice contribution)

Responding to POM's signature demands

• "Sharpen the operations mechanism / contribution." Strengthen the mechanism and the managerial lever; show what the OM field now learns and what a manager does differently — do not merely add citations (see pom-theory-development, pom-contribution-framing).
• "Practice relevance is unclear." This is a real gate at POM. Translate results into operational magnitude (cost, fill rate, wait time) and an actionable decision; add evidence, not rhetoric.
• "Strengthen the method." For analytical work, add a proof, relax an assumption, or extend the numerical study (full derivations → e-companion). For empirical work, add identification or robustness; for data science, demonstrate operational value.
• "Add analysis/study." Often decisive — but watch the 32-page budget; new material typically lives in the e-companion so the main body stays within limit.

Tone and tactics

• Be respectful and substantive; referees are colleagues investing in the paper.
• Concede gracefully where they are right; make the change.
• Disagree with evidence, not assertion; if you decline a request, give an OM reason and an alternative analysis where possible.
• Address every point — silent omissions read as evasion.
• Surface referee conflicts to the Department Editor and state your chosen resolution.
• Do not reframe a barred resubmission as a normal revision — only an explicit invitation reopens POM.

Worked micro-example: weak vs. strong response

Referee comment: "The base-stock result appears to hinge on full backordering; under lost sales the structure could collapse."

• Weak response: "We thank the referee for this observation. Backordering is a standard assumption in the inventory literature (citations)." — This concedes nothing, tests nothing, and will read to the Department Editor as evasion of a legitimate modeling concern.
• Strong response: "We agree the demand-fulfillment regime deserves scrutiny. We re-derived the ordering policy under lost sales (new e-companion section EC.4): the base-stock structure survives, the optimal level rises modestly across our calibrated instances, and the managerial ranking — dual sourcing dominates expediting — is unchanged. Revised Section 5.2 and Table 3 report the comparison; full proofs remain in EC.4." — New analysis, quantified operational consequence, exact main-paper and e-companion locations.

What POM referees probe, by method track

• Analytical: every load-bearing assumption defended in operational terms (why stationary demand, why exponential service times), and tractability choices priced — a numerical study showing what relaxing them changes.
• Empirical: identification threats named and countered — endogenous inventory or capacity choices, demand censoring in sales records — plus robustness of any structural estimates to alternative specifications and samples.
• Behavioral: incentive compatibility of the experimental design and an argued bridge from the lab decision to real ordering or scheduling behavior.
• Data science: operational value demonstrated beyond predictive accuracy — a decision that improves, not merely a metric that rises.

Checklist

• Manuscript actually revised before the letter was written
• Editor's priorities (incl. practice relevance) addressed first and explicitly
• Every referee comment restated and answered; none skipped
• Each response names main-paper and e-companion locations
• Mechanism/practice and method demands met with real changes, not citations only
• Revised main document still within 32 pages
• Referee conflicts surfaced and resolved for the editor

Output format

【Decision round】1st R&R / 2nd round / ...
【Editor priorities addressed】1... 2... 3...
【Per-referee coverage】R1: x/x, R2: x/x, R3: x/x — all answered? yes/no
【Major changes】mechanism/practice: ... method/data: ... new analysis: ...
【Declined requests + justification】[...]
【Page/e-companion status】main pages within 32? new material → e-companion
【Next step】resubmit via ScholarOne; on next decision → pom-review-process