Jfm Referee Strategy

Referee Strategy (jfm-referee-strategy)

When to trigger

• Pre-submission: you want to surface the objections a microstructure insider will raise before they do
• A report arrived and you need to triage which comments are fatal, fixable, or push-back
• You suspect the referee will challenge measurement or endogeneity rather than the idea
• You need to estimate whether the asks are within an R&R's reach or signal a reject
• The editor's letter prioritizes some comments and you must read the signal

The objections JFM referees actually raise

A JFM referee is a microstructure specialist. The predictable lines of attack cluster, and most live in measurement and identification, not novelty.

Running the pre-mortem and the triage

Pre-submission pre-mortem. For each row above that could apply, write the strongest version of the objection and the exhibit/argument that answers it. If an answer requires analysis you have not run, run it now — it is cheaper than an R&R cycle. The output is a list of latent weaknesses, each with a planned defense.

Post-decision triage. Sort every comment into: (1) fatal-if-true — goes to the top of the response and gets the most work; (2) fixable — new analysis or exposition; (3) defensible — politely push back with evidence; (4) editor-flagged — the editor signaled priority, so it is effectively (1). Read the editor's letter for the real decision rule: which comments must be resolved for acceptance. Then hand the sorted list to jfm-rebuttal.

Timing the pre-mortem

Run the pre-mortem twice. The first pass is before submission, while there is still time to run the analysis that closes a foreseeable objection — this is its highest value, since adding an alternative-measure column now costs days, whereas discovering the gap in an R&R costs months. The second pass is on receiving the report, to triage the actual comments against your anticipated list: comments you predicted are already half-answered, and genuinely new ones tell you where your model of the field was incomplete. Skipping the pre-submission pass is the most expensive economy in the whole process.

Worked pre-mortem (illustrative)

A paper claims a new dark-pool venue worsened lit-market liquidity. The pre-mortem surfaces: (1) "It's just the measure" — the result holds only for quoted spread → run effective and realized before submitting; (2) "Endogenous venue choice" — flow self-selects into the dark pool → exploit the staggered venue launch and cluster by stock; (3) "Time-of-day" — dark trading concentrates midday → add intraday-bin fixed effects; (4) "Incremental to known fragmentation work" — name the closest 3 papers and the gap. Each is answered with a concrete exhibit before the editor ever sees the paper. The output is a short table of latent weakness → planned defense → exhibit number, which doubles as the skeleton of the eventual response letter.

Reading the decision letter

The editor's letter, not the referee reports, encodes the real decision rule. Look for: which comments the editor calls "essential" or "must address"; whether the tone is "revise" (fixable) or "we would consider a substantially revised paper" (closer to reject); and whether referees conflict (your cue to ask the editor to adjudicate rather than guess). An R&R that asks only for measurement and inference checks is far more tractable than one questioning the core identification — calibrate the effort and the timeline accordingly, and be honest with coauthors about which it is.