From Economics Journal Watch a nice story (pdf) of someone who wrote a well considered, and expressed paper which was rejected, only to massively complicate it with otiose mathematics – whereupon it was published by the first journal it was submitted to. Some highlights below the fold.
A colleague presented a fairly complex paper on how firms might use warranties to extract rent from certain users of their products. No one in the audience seemed to follow the argument. Because I found the argument to be perfectly clear, I repeatedly defended the author and I was able to bring the audience to an understanding of the paper. The author was so pleased that I was able to understand his work and explain it to others that he asked me if I was willing to coauthor the paper with him. I said I would be delighted.
I immersed myself in the literature for a few of months so that I could more precisely fit our contribution into the existing literature. We managed to reduce the equations in the paper to six. At this stage the paper was perfectly clear and was written at a level so that it could reach a broad audience. When we submitted the paper to risk, uncertainty, and insurance journals, the referees responded that the results were self-evident. After some degree of frustration, my coauthor suggested that the problem with the paper might be that we had made the argument too easy to follow, and thus referees and editors were not sufficiently impressed. He said that he could make the paper more impressive by generalizing the model. While making the same point as the original paper, the new paper would be more mathematically elegant, and it would become absolutely impenetrable to most readers. The resulting paper had fifteen equations, two propositions and proofs, dozens of additional mathematical expressions, and a mathematical appendix containing nineteen equations and even more mathematical expressions. I personally could no longer understand the paper and I could not possibly present the paper alone.
The paper was published in the first journal to which we submitted. It took two years to receive one referee report. The journal sent it out to a total of seven referees, but only one was able to write a report on it. Apparently he was sufficiently impressed.
There may be a Nobel Prize in the offing for Hakes and his colleague if they can eventually get the original version of the paper published. George Akerlof writes of his paper, “The Market for Lemons”:
Perhaps the message is, “Don’t give up!”
I have always liked this anecdote from Hal Varian along similar lines
How to Build An Economic Model in Your Spare Time
Mike – that message at the end of your post is a funny message.
The message I took from the problems the article just scrapes the surface of was that I didn’t want to spend a lot of time in farcical exercises such as the one you outline above. If I was a lot smarter than I am it might have been worth it, but then if that were the case again, I expect I could spend my time more profitably than fitting ideas into the latest obsessions and fads of the mediocre. If I was a very smart fellow I’d rather be Stephen Wolfram than Ed Prescott.
Of course Akerlof is a good writer, and Markets for Lemons was an exceptionally lucid and imaginative paper. Being lucid and imaginative it was unconventional, and that’s why it was probably rejected (journal editors being selected for their respectability rather than their willingness to push boundaries).
Mind you, that editor was right – economics was changed after it was published.