After 18 months, two weeks, and 6 days without any a decision on whether to accept Indifference, Indecision, and Coin-Flipping on the part of Theory and Decision (published by Springer-Verlag), and after the failure of the editor to tell me the actual status of the paper in the application process, I have ended the application.

As I have mentioned before, I submitted a version of this paper to them on 5 September 2009, alerting them that one of their editors was creditted in the acknowledgments. I was told that I needed to redact those acknowledgments; I submitted a version with that change on 8 September of 2009.

The paper was submitted by way of a website running software called Editorial Manager, which offers a report of the ostensible current status of each paper. Neither the publisher of this software nor Springer seem anywhere to define the respective stages, nor even to identify them, except in-so-far as, as one waits and watches, various statuses are reported.

It took a little while before the status was reported as Editor assigned, but I had been assured by a JEO Assistant on 9 September that an editor was assigned. The status was subsequently up-dated in early January of 2010, when it became Reviewers assigned. Needless to say that I was concerned that it should have taken four months just to get reviewers assigned. In any case, the status was not up-dated again until 23 March 2010, at which point it was, well, Reviewers assigned, but now with a time-stamp of 23 March, as if reviewers had withdrawn, and new reviewers had to be found.

Nothing in the report had changed as of 28 June, when I finally wrote.

Can you please provide some information on the status of "Indifference, Indecision, and Coin-Flipping" (THEO789), submitted to Theory and Decision?

The manuscript was submitted on 8 Sep 2009. Since early January, the status reported at Editorial Manager has been "Reviewers Assigned", although the time-stamp of the status was changed in late Narch [sic, *facepalm*].

I received a reply on 29 June from the JEO Assistant.

We apologize for the delay in the processing of your paper.

There seems to be some difficulties in finding potential reviewers. However, I have forwarded your mail to Editor.

I did not receive anything from the essentially unidentified Editor. In any case, it seemed that Reviewers assigned meant something other than that reviewers had been assigned; rather, it could mean something such as that reviewers were being sought. And, 9 months after my paper had been submitted, it still didn't have any.

At the first anniversary of the submission, the status still read Reviewers Assigned (with, however, no further changes in the time-stamp); so, on 9 September I wrote

Could you please provide some information on the status of "Indifference, Indecision, and Coin-Flipping" (THEO789), submitted to Theory and Decision?

The manuscript was official submitted on 8 September 2009.

The JEO Assistant promptly replied

We apologize for the delay in the processing of your paper. Your manuscript has been sent out for review and I have forwarded your mail to him.

You will be notified once the decision has been taken.

So, apparently, Reviewers assigned could mean that reviewers were sought, or that they'd indeed been appointed; and it seemed that now my paper actually had them, though it wasn't clear when it got them between 29 June and 9 September. I went back to waiting.

On 15 November, the status reported by Editorial Manager was changed to Under review. So it would seem that a paper could be sent out for review, yet it would take another month-and-some-days before it would actually be under review. Or something. Evidently, the status labels are names, not descriptions; without a special dictionary, they tell one nothing.

I discovered that John Turri, commenting at a 'blog of Brian Leiter, reconstructed the labels of the Editorial Manager statuses as

1. New submission
2. Editor assigned
3. Reviewers assigned
4. Under review
5. Reviews complete
6. Editor has a decision

Anyway, as of 21 March of this year, the status was still reported as Under review. So I wrote

This article has been in your hands for over 18 months. While that is not a record, it is none-the-less a rather dire length of time.

For more than four months, Editorial Manager has labelled the article as "Under review". Whatever one may say for or against this paper, it does not take such time to actively read, digest, and critique. I would like to know what "Under review" actually indicates and, more importantly, what the actual status of this paper is.

I fear that I have simply wasted considerable time having submitted this paper to Springer Verlag, and that I should look for a publisher who might actually want to publish it.

and I received a reply on 21 March.a

We apologize for the delay caused.

I have forwarded your inquiry to the editor and will let you know once I hear from him.

Now, that word caused gives me pause. If there'd been some assertion about causation, the caused would be fairly natural. As it is, that's just a bald caused, as if there'd been some concern that the delay might be uncaused — ex nihilo, as it were; but I don't think that they're trying to preëmpt metaphysical concerns on my part. That use of caused may be an attempt to allude to the period of time, never exactly identified for me, when potential reviewers were fleeing into the wilderness, but it could be that I'm looking at wording that has been imperfectly recycled.

The Editor hadn't bothered to contact me as of 23 March (and the reported status was unchanged), so I wrote

Given the history here, I have little expectation of receiving an adequate response from the editor or from anyone else at Springer Verlag before I yank my article from submission.

The reply on 24 March was

We apologize for the delay caused.

I have forwarded your inquiry to the editor and will let you know once I hear from him.

and, yeah, that's verbatim what I was told on 21 March. Recycled.

I could speculate about what the Hell has been and is happening at Theory and Decision, but it would just be speculation. I don't know whether I've been confronted with incompetence, indifference, malevolence, or some combination of two or of three of these; or if everybody's grandparents and uncles keep dying. (I'm pretty sure that one person over at Springer is mostly just helpless in the face of what others are doing, or choosing not to do.) But it's toxically infra dignitatem to continue to endure this situation. If the Editor were to have contacted me, to identify bottle-necks and sticking points, and to offer some reason to expect that the end result wouldn't just be rejection based upon a sloppy, last-minute reading of my paper, then it would be a different story.

So I've written to them

The offer of this paper to Theory and Decision is ended, as more than eighteen and a half months have been allowed to lapse without a decision, and the reluctance to keep me informed has now descended to a refusal to answer queries at all.

Whatever your superiors might direct notwithstanding, please none-the-less spare me any boiler-plate or otherwise vaguely insulting expression of regret.

I'll need to find another journal to which to submit the paper; I fear that this will be difficult. When other journals rejected the paper and gave reason (as did all but one), it was always that the paper was not appropriate to a readership as general as theirs; so I'd need to find a journal that can tolerate what is, for economics, very formal mathematics, concerned with what many readers would mistake for impractical refinement.

I've made or will make a few changes as well. I've modified the formulæ so that braces are only used to bound the definitions of sets, and angle-brackets are only used to hold the elements of lotteries; I'm hoping that these two changes help the reader. I've abandoned the use of partial ordering and, where I quote Savage using it, explained that the term incomplete preordering would now be more typical. I've corrected a spelling error in the acknowledgments. I have gone back and forth on whether to use a which or a that for a particular clause in a foot-note. I may perhaps include a brief commentary, essentially reïterating points about it made in this 'blog, on a paper by Eliaz and Ok.

Up-Date (2011:04/18): I have posted a continuation (and presumed completion) of the tale of these communications with Springer concerning this paper.

Last night and this morning, I used Writer2LAΤΕΧ to export the notes for my principal paper-in-progress from ODT format to a LAΤΕΧ file, imported that into LyX, and then spent some time cleaning things. This was in an attempt, which looks fairly successful, to overcome the problem that I now have of OpenOffice under RHEL failing to render various mathematical characters.

The results for the formulæ are not really WYSIWYG (nor does LyX seek to offer exactly a WYSIWYG display of formulæ), but they are close enough that, as I look at them, I don't have to spend most of my time thinking about the mark-up rather than thinking about the theoretical constructs that they are supposed to represent. (In fact, I'm one of those folk who prefers to word-process with the non-printing characters represented, and I'm quite comfortable with most of the extra stuff here in the representation of formulæ.) The symbols that I want are being rendered nicely, with the notable (but not egregious) exception of which is presently displayed as \defeq. (It's defined in a LAΤΕΧ document preamble as \stackrel{\mathrm{def}}{=}.)

I still have to learn more of my way around LyX but, barring some unexpected remedial action on the part of OpenOffice programmers, I will probably migrate to LyX for the production of technical documents.

At 08:48 on 8 September 2009, I had resubmitted my paper on indecision to a journal after replacing acknowledgements with place-holders. (The paper was originally submitted on 3 September, with the acknowledgements in-place and with a note from me that one of their editors was mentioned thereïn. The journal tossed it back to me to scrub the acknowledgments.)

To-day, then, at 08:48, we passed Day 500 since the (re)submission of the paper. Day 500, and the present status is Under review, which became its official status on 15 November of last year. (I earlier labored its previous status changes.) Doubtless that someone is thinking that they've only had the paper for 67 days, but the journal itself has had it for 500 days.

I am aware — Would that there were a G_d to help us all! — that 500 days is not a record for such delay. Still, economics journals which report their mean time-to-decision typically declare it to be something on the order of a month.

Those of you who've followed this 'blog for a while might be wondering what happened to the paper that I started submitting to journals in mid-June of last year. Well, yeah; me too.

As previously reported here, it was rejected by three journals as unsuitable to a general audience of economists, after being rejected by one without any reason being given. As it was rejected for being too specialized by one journal, I would then submit it to a more specialized journal. I submitted it to a fifth journal in early September. That process had to be repeated as their representative wanted me to purge the acknowledgments before the paper were passed-on to an editor (I'm not sure why someone there didn't delete them from the LAΤΕΧ file that they'd had me submit, nor why their submission template provides for acknowledgments, with no guidelines on when not to include them), but the paper was then officially recorded as submitted on 8 September. And I've been waiting since for a yea or for a nay.

They have an on-line site at which I can check on the status of my paper. After a while, the site reported that an editor had been assigned; then, in early January that reviewers had been assigned. Anthony suggested that perhaps they had had trouble finding reviewers who would be sufficiently comfortable with the sort of mathematics used. In late March the status report was changed to say that reviewers were assigned at that time, as if perhaps one or more of the original reviewers had left without returning an evaluation.

This journal doesn't really provide any guideline about querying them concerning the status of a submission. A common guideline from economics journals (as some others) is to contact them if one hasn't received any word after six months. I couldn't really claim that I'd not got any word for six months, but what I'd got surely didn't seem informative. Towards the end of June, after getting an opinion from Anthony, who said that I should feel free to query them, I did. The person whom I contacted said that, much as Anthony had suggested, there seemed to have been a problem finding reviewers, and that my query had been forwarded to the editor.

I've received nothing further. So, I don't really know the status of my paper.

Towards my next paper, I've been thinking a lot about decision-making where one has uncertainty but not quantified probabilities or even necessarily a total ordering of possible outcomes by plausibility. Most recently, I've tried to formalize the notion of when, without quantified probabilities, one lottery may be said to be fairer than another, and of a simple rule for selecting the fairer of two coins (as in my previous paper I have made considerable use of orderings of coins by entropy).

Yester-day, in the context of such ponderings, I arrived at some interesting, simple complementarity rules. Consider two actions, each paired with one considered outcome. Between these, various plausibility relations may obtain — the first pair may be more plausible than the second, the second may be more plausible than the first, they may be equally plausible, their relative plausibility may be unknown, or the relation may be a union of two or three of the aforementioned (eg one pair may be more-or-equally plausible). In any case, whatever that relation, the same relation will hold if we reverse the order of the pairs and take the logical complement of the outcomes. Here's an example of the formal expression of one of these rules where I'm using the same notation that I did in in my entry of 19 August, and represents the relationship of the left side being more plausible than the right side.

(Common-sense examples are easy to generate. For example: If it is more likely that the Beet Weasel will bite than that the Woman of Interest will stay home, then it is more likely that she will depart than that he will refrain from biting. Or: If we don't know whether a given nickle is more likely to come-up heads than is a given quarter, then we don't know whether the quarter is more likely to come-up tails than is the nickle.)

In the context of an irreflexive, antisymmetric, transitive relation, one can identify closeness without measurement. For example, if A is more plausible than B and B is more plausible than C, then B is closer both to A and to C than they are each to the other.

This abstraction of closeness, along with the principles of complementarity, allow one to identify when one coin is more fair than another, without having any quantification of fairness, so long as one can order the plausibilities of outcomes across coins. One simple rule is to pick the coin whose most likely outcome is less likely than the most likely outcome of other coins; an equivalent rule would be to pick the coin whose least likely outcome is more likely than the least likely outcomes of other coins.

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BTW, the aforementioned previous paper is still in the hands of the editors of the journal to which I submitted it a bit less than four months ago. I've not had any word from them. But, while this journal did not provide a time-frame, other journals give frames such as six months. (A friend recently had one of her submissions rejected at just before the three-month mark.) It is at least somewhat plausible that, by the time that said previous paper is published somewhere, I will have this next paper ready to submit to a journal.

Last night, I finished the clean-up of a LAΤΕΧ version of my paper on incomplete preferences. From remarks by a person more knowledgeable about ΤΕΧ than I, it seemed that my best option in dealing with the under-sized angle brackets was to just fall back to using only parentheses, square brackets, and braces for taller delimiters. And most width problems were resolved by expressing formulæ over more lines. Unfortunately, these changes leave the formulæ harder to read than in the original.

This after-noon, I completed the submission process to one of the two specialized journals recommended by the advising editor who rejected it at the previous journal to which I submitted it. The submission process for this latest journal required that I name the other journals to which I'd submitted the paper. As simultaneous submissions are disallowed, basically they were asking for a list of which journals has rejected the paper. I gave it. (I didn't tell them that the third had been suggested by the second, nor that theirs had been suggested by the fourth.)

Anyway, I'm back to waiting for a response.

Large parts of Sunday and of Monday were given-over to producing a LAΤΕΧ version of my paper on incomplete preferences. Some part of to-day will be spent trying to complete that conversion.

Each of the two journals suggested by the advising editor who last rejected my paper requires submissions to be either LAΤΕΧ or in the form of a Microsoft Word file with formulæ encoded for its equation editor.

The original is an ODT, whose equations are encoded for the OpenOffice formula editor. The OpenOffice software can export a Word .DOC, but the formula would be rendered as text (rather than for the equation editor), and pretty badly at that. I used Writer2LaTeX, a plug-in for OpenOffice, to create a first-pass version of LAΤΕΧ source for my paper. A great deal of formatting went by the way-side, but the formulæ themselves seem to have come through the process mostly intact. The worst glitch so far was that U+2280 (⊀) was translated to \nsucc (⊁). (I've contacted the developer.)

I've nested the formulæ within more appropriate mark-up, and wrestled the rest of the mark-up of the paper into pretty good shape. The most glaring problems that I have right now are with the formulæ; those angle-brackets that should be rendered quite large are not, and some of the formulæ are simply too wide. And I still need to walk through the paper to make sure that my copying-and-pasting didn't go south anywhere.

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This conversion of my paper represents the first time that I have worked much with LAΤΕΧ beyond creäting bald formulæ.

When I first started doing word-processing of more than plain-text files, LAΤΕΧ itself didn't yet exist, the ΤΕΧ system (on which LAΤΕΧ is founded) was still quite new, and I had personal connections to AT&T, such that I learned and used an older system, troff, which had been developed at AT&T (to justify the development of Unix). I had (and somewhere still have) a porting of troff to MS-DOS, could get pretty much any desired result with it (unlike most troff users, I knew its mark-up pretty thoroughly, and didn't rely on macros other than those that I'd written myself), and saw little reason to learn ΤΕΧ or LAΤΕΧ. When I did migrate from troff, it was to WYSIWYG programs.[1]

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[1] There was an attempt, called Scientific Word, at something like a WYSIWYG interface for LAΤΕΧ; but, at the time that I investigated Scientific Word, it was ghastly. Its installation routine took hours, and, if the system already had a lot of installed fonts, would fail at the very end, in a way that its own programmers could not diagnose. And, if successfully installed, Scientific Word wouldn't produce decent LAΤΕΧ source anyway.

My latest submission of my paper, to a yet more specialized journal, has met with a fate similar to that of my previous submissions:

The advisory editor suggests that the paper does not fit the general readership of [this journal] (see his short report below).

That advisory editor writes

I suggest to the author to submit his paper, which certainly deserves an outlet, to more specialistic journals

and then recommends two in particular. So I will review the guidelines for each, and try to decide to which of them I will make my next submission. I take some solace in the fact that, while my paper is indeed being rejected, editors are suggesting that it truly ought to be published in a respected academic journal.

Recently, when working on my next paper, I was struck by the formal similarity between two expressions.

Using to represent outcome X of action c, and to represent a relationship of equal plausibility, implies that X_i is certain given c, and implies that X_i is impossible given c. (The two expressions differ in the subscript of the outcome on the right-hand side of the relation.)

The ideas here are simple: If no other outcome contributes plausibility, then X_i is certain; if X_i contributes no plausibility, then X_i is impossible.

After some vacillation over the question of to which of two journals next to submit my paper, I have submitted it to a game theory journal which has published at least one other article attempting to operationalize incomplete preferences. (I think that attempt rather less satisfactory than mine.)

I have, alternately, been considering submitting to an older journal, based in Europe, which focusses primarily on mathematical microëconomic theory, but I decided both that they would be more likely to reject the paper as too specialized, and that my paper would be less widely read if published there.