Ier Rebuttal

Rebuttal Strategy (ier-rebuttal)

When to trigger

• An IER R&R (or major/minor revision) letter arrived and you need a response plan
• A reject-and-resubmit or a split decision (referees disagree) needs a strategy
• A referee challenges the load-bearing assumption, the identification, or a proof and you must decide what to concede vs. defend
• You need to convert a stack of referee comments into an ordered, owned revision plan

Reading an IER decision letter

IER reviews are rigor-gated and theory-leaning, so the comments that must be resolved are usually about correctness and generality, not framing. Triage every comment into one of four buckets before writing a word of response:

The response-letter craft

1. Lead with a short summary of the main changes — let the editor see the paper is materially better before the point-by-point.
2. Quote each comment, then respond directly beneath it, and point to the exact section/page/equation where the change lives. An IER referee re-checks; make re-checking easy.
3. For correctness fixes, show the math/result, not just a promise. "We now prove uniqueness in Appendix B.2 under condition C; the condition means [economics]." Concreteness wins.
4. When a check moves the result, report it and bound it. IER referees trust authors who say "the welfare gain falls to 3.8% under the alternative elasticity, still positive and economically meaningful" over authors who hide the movement.
5. Disagree sparingly and with evidence. If the referee is wrong, say so politely and prove it; pick the one or two hills worth defending, concede the rest gracefully.
6. Address the editor's synthesis separately. The editor's letter often names the two or three decisive issues — make sure each is answered prominently, not lost in the per-referee detail.
7. Mind the page ceiling. Revisions can push past 50 pages; move added proofs/checks to the online appendix and keep the main text within the limit (检索于 2026-06；以官网为准).

Handling split decisions and the theory/empirics referee divide

IER's broad readership means a paper can draw referees from different subfields who weight things differently — a theory referee may want the proof tightened while an empirical referee wants more robustness, and they may even disagree on what the paper is for. When referees split, do not average their demands; instead, identify the editor's synthesis (the editor's letter usually adjudicates) and align the revision to it. If the editor has not adjudicated, address both demands but make explicit in the letter how you reconciled them — e.g., "Referee 1 asked for a weaker assumption; Referee 2 asked for an additional specification; the revised Section 3 does both, and they are mutually consistent because...". Showing you can hold both perspectives is itself persuasive at a general-interest journal.

Worked example (illustrative)

A referee writes: "The uniqueness proof is incomplete." This is a must-fix (correctness). The wrong response promises to "clarify in revision." The right IER response completes the proof in the appendix, states in the letter exactly where ("Uniqueness now proved in Appendix B.2 under Assumption 3; the condition is interpreted in Section 2.4"), and notes that the comparative statics in Section 4 rely only on the now-established uniqueness. The referee can re-check in one click, sees the gap is genuinely closed, and the correctness objection — the kind that sinks IER papers — is retired cleanly.