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.

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.

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.

Good L_rd! In response to my submission, the editor of the third journal responded

While I find the paper interesting, I feel it is too specialized a topic for a general audience journal such as [ours].

The thing is that, unlike the previous two journals, which cover economics in general, this is a journal of microëconomics. Yet, like the editor of the previous journal, the editor still feels that the paper is too specialized for the audience. (Though, as noted, this third journal was recommended by that editor of the second.)

I need to figure-out just who won't think it too specialized.

I have submitted my paper to a third journal, that recommended by the editor who rejected it at the previous journal.

This third journal is one from an association which, like many, charges a lower submission fee to its members. Even with the annual dues and on the assumption that I only made one submission in a year, I would still save money, so I joined. However, after I registered and paid, I learned that it could take up to four weeks for my membership information to be recorded and provided to me. Hence, this delay between submissions. I'm not sure that the money saved was worth that delay.

The second journal to which I submitted my paper is well known for extremely rapid rejections, and my paper was no exception. However, unlike the editor of the previous journal, the editor of this journal gave me a reason, not enough value added for a general economics audience, and suggested a different journal to which I might submit it.

Now, if by value added he means interest, then he may well be correct. And certainly the normal presumption in mainstream economics is that agents are the best judges of what is good for them, so it would probably be bad form for me to insist that the general economics audience ought to care more about the foundations of microëconomics.

The editor in question is a macroëconomist, part of a minority in economics who like to think about economic aggregates. But he's one of that noble sort of macroëconomist who seek solid microfoundatons for their macroëconomics, so I'm less able to make a case that he has a bias against microëconomic theory than if he were one of those Keynesians who insist that aggregates can or must be explained immediately one in terms of others.

Anyway, although I'm unhappy with another rejection, I'm pleased that it is explained, and in terms that indicate that it is not being waved-away as foolish nonsense.

I incorporated some changes to my paper that I wished (almost immediately after I'd submitted it) that I had made sooner. Then I chose the next journal to which to submit it, read their submission guidelines, made some changes in the form of the citations, and submitted it to that next journal.

I received a decidedly uninformative rejection letter yester-day from the first journal to which I submitted my paper. Said rejection was a form letter explaining that a member of the editorial board, rather than a referee, read the paper, and that, when in such cases they decided to reject a paper, they save time by not producing a report. In most cases we are not rejecting papers because they have a particular flaw. (Although, presumably, in other cases they are, and they haven't even told me into which of these two categories my paper falls.)

Anyway, I need to decide to which journal I will next submit, look at their submission guidelines, reformat it and see how much more or less I can fit into it, and then send it off again.

I submitted a version of Indifference, Indecision, and Coin-Flipping to a journal this morning. In that context, I'm going make the working version more generally available.

For those who want to wade through the mathematics but find mysterious some of the notation or the formal notion of a Cartesian product or of a relation, there is a quick-and-dirty explanation of some of that infrastructure.

For those who, instead, want to get the basic ideas without carefully following the math or confronting the proofs, there is a Gentler Guide. It would be helpful, though perhaps not necessary, to have the original paper at hand when reading the Gentler Guide.

I might someday write a Gentler-Still Guide, with even less of the mathematical formalities, but such a treatment would either replace those formalities with verbal constructions that were themselves difficult to follow, or would necessarily discard an even greater amount of the content from the original paper.

If one has a question or questions (concerning this work) not answered by one of the three papers, a comment to this 'blog entry is about as good a way of asking as any.

By far, most submissions to the better reputed economics journals are simply rejected, and I have submitted to what may be the most prestigious economics journal. I am hoping to receive either a simple acceptance or a directive to revise and resubmit. (With economics papers in general, the latter is more common that the former, and is typically seen as good news.) If the paper is simply rejected, then (assuming that no fatal and irreparable flaws were found in the work) the next thing to do is to modify it, as much as seems reasonable, in light of any comments from the referees (reviewers) and from the editor, and submit it to one of the best remaining journals that I think might accept it.

It can take months for referees to actually read a given paper, and between the time that a paper is first submitted to its first journal and it is published in some journal (assuming that the paper is indeed ever published) can be a matter of years. Unsurprisingly, I hope for a faster resolution than that.

Working on that less formal explanation of my paper has paid another dividend.

The model in the paper has involved six propositions, which function like axiomata, specifically about choices concerning lotteries. I have known for some time that these weren't orthogonal — that there was overlap amongst what they said. It is at best unfortunate to have that sort of redundancy in foundational propositions. But I'd not seen how to reduce it.

This morning, after describing those propositions less formally, and then considering what to say about the theoremata that follow, I started to see how to turn one of those propositions into a theorem. After a bit of musing and fretting, I've effected the change.