Manuscript Preparation
Double Blind
The manuscript should be double blind compatible, which means (i) remove clear indications of the authors’ names and institutions, (ii) remove all acknowledgments, and (iii) the paper should be written in such a way that it does not clearly reveal an author’s identity (e.g., “I extend the work in my dissertation (Norman 1995).”). Author names, institutions, and acknowledgements will be returned to the printed manuscript upon acceptance for publication.
Formatting Requirements
Submissions should use an 11-pt font (12 pt is acceptable too), have 1-inch margins on all sides, and have at least 1.5 spacing. Footnotes should be used sparingly and have similar formatting.
Page Limit
There is no explicit page limit for manuscripts submitted to Management Science. Papers are judged based on their contribution relative to their length. As such, short papers are encouraged and will not be labeled as a “research note.” Although there is no explicit page limit, manuscripts will infrequently exceed 40 pages (using the formatting described above).
Abstract
Write a text-only abstract of no more than 200 words. Do not include references in your abstract.
References
List references alphabetically by author at the end of the paper in conformance with journal style. In-text citations should be indicated by the author’s last name and year of publication, e.g., (Norman 1977) or Norman (1977).
Electronic Companions
We do not encourage the use of Electronic Companions. Analytical proofs and data analysis results should be published in the main body of the manuscript or in the manuscript’s appendix, which will appear in the print journal. We will include some materials in an Electronic Companion, such as instruction sets, survey instruments, and data sets. Authors are free to provide reviewers with additional results to assist in their evaluation, but those materials should be included in a "reply to the reviewer" file. It is understood that those materials will not be printed in the journal nor will they appear in the paper’s Electronic Companion.
Template Files
Authors can write their manuscript using their preferred software as long as they can create a PDF that meets the above guidelines. As such, Management Science does not provide template files.
Submission Instructions
Process
All manuscripts must be submitted electronically via http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ms. Authors without Internet access should contact the managing editor to make alternate submission arrangements.
Required Materials
In the submission process you will be requested to submit, in addition to your manuscript,
- The name of the Department Editor to whom you are submitting your manuscript. (Before choosing an editor, you should consult the journal's Editorial Board list and the
Department Editorial Statements .) This editor is likely to handle your paper. A different editor may handle your paper if the workload of your chosen editor is too great or if the editor feels that another editor would be better suited to handle your paper. If a different editor is assigned to your paper then you will be notified (and, of course, you will have the option to withdraw your manuscript).
- The names of three Associate Editors who would be appropriate to review your manuscript. The Associate Editors should in general be chosen from the list of current Associate Editors in the Editorial Board list. However, you may recommend one or two Guest Associate Editors. If you recommend a Guest Associate Editor then you will be asked to provide his or her contact information, and you should explain the reason for your choice in a cover letter.
- The names of six appropriate reviewers for your manuscript, including their institutions and e-mail addresses.
- The list of names you provide (DE, AE, and reviewers) should not include someone with whom you or your co-authors has a conflict-of-interest (COI). An author has a conflict of interest with (a) his/her major professor or a student for whom the author served as a major professor, (b) a person working at the same institution, and/or (c) a co-author on work completed or in progress. If you feel that it is absolutely necessary to include a person with a COI, then you must clearly identify the COI with that particular person and explain your reason for the person’s inclusion.
Supplementary Materials
During the submission process you may upload additional materials that you feel will support the review process of your paper. In particular, if you are submitting a revision, then you should submit a document that summarizes the changes you have made and details your response to each of the comments from the previous round of reviews.
Copyright Policy
The submission of a paper to Management Science for reviewing means that the author certifies that the manuscript is not copyrighted; nor has it been accepted for publication (or published) by any peer-reviewed journal; nor is it being reviewed elsewhere.
Management Insights
If your paper is accepted for publication, then a Management Insights paragraph for your manuscript will be written by the Management Insights Editor, who may contact you with questions regarding the paper.
Review Process
Review for Contribution
The Department Editor (DE) and possibly an Associate Editor (AE) will first evaluate whether a manuscript has sufficient merit to send to reviewers for further review. If not, the paper will be returned to the authors with an explanation of the editors’ reasoning.
Detailed Review
If a manuscript passes the initial screening, the Associate Editor will recruit reviewers to assess the merits of the manuscript. Upon the receipt of the reviews, the Associate Editor will provide a recommendation to the Department Editor, who will decide whether the paper should be accepted as is, revised, or rejected. Note that Management Science makes use of a double-blind review process in which the Department Editors and Associate Editors know the identity of the authors but the reviewers do not.
Timeline
Our goal is to provide quality feedback to 90% of authors within 90 days. Conditional that a paper is sent out to reviewers, authors should receive a decision from the Department Editor within 65 days on average.
Decision
Notification
E-mail notification will be sent to the corresponding author announcing that a decision has been made. You can access the decision and the supporting documents (e.g., reviews) through your Author Center. The possible decisions are Reject, Major Revision, Minor Revision, and Accept.
Revisions
Revisions, if suggested, will cause the manuscript to appear in the "Manuscripts Awaiting Revision" area of your Author Center. Manuscripts that are not revised within one year may be reclassified as "withdrawn," and revisions submitted after the one-year mark may be treated as new submissions. All revisions should be accompanied by a separate "Response to Reviewers" document, which provides a summary of the major changes made to the document and a point-by-point description of whether and how the issues raised by the reviewers and editors have been addressed.
Rejection
As a rule, Management Science does not invite resubmissions of rejected manuscripts. But in exceptional cases (e.g., an overt error was made in the review process or the analysis has been so significantly improved as to constitute an entirely new paper) we will consider them. If a submitted manuscript is based on a paper previously rejected by Management Science, it is the responsibility of the author(s) to reveal this and to state clearly why resubmission is justified. Failure to do this may be grounds for rejection.
After Acceptance
Final Submission
If the paper is conditionally accepted for publication you will be requested to submit the final version of your manuscript in Word, Tex, Latex, or WordPerfect format along with a signed copyright transfer agreement. Your paper will be transmitted directly to the Production Editor at INFORMS. If any additional information is needed, you will be contacted.
As a condition of final acceptance of a paper for publication in an INFORMS journal, the author must indicate if the paper is posted on a website other than the author's personal website. The author is responsible for ensuring that, if any part of the paper has been copyrighted for prepublication, for example, as a working paper, the copyright can and will be transferred to INFORMS when the paper has been accepted. This includes both print and electronic forms of the paper. Authors may post their papers on websites after acceptance and prior to publication, as long as the sites are not copyrighted or do not serve as formal repositories. Authors may not post their page proofs on websites prior to publication. Contact permissions@informs.org for further information.
More Information
If you have any questions, are unable to access the ScholarOne Manuscripts site, or are having trouble getting information on the status of your paper, please contact the Managing Editor.
Forms for Authors
Copyright transfer agreement
Editor-in-Chief
Gérard P. Cachon
University of Pennsylvania
543 JMHH
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Phone: (215) 573-8743
Email: ms.editor@wharton.upenn.edu
Management Insights Editor
Michael F. Gorman
University of Dayton
Department Editors (see below for Associate Editors)
Accounting
Madhav Rajan, Stanford University
Business Strategy
Bruno Cassiman, IESE and K. U. Leuven
Decision Analysis
Teck-Hua Ho, University of California, Berkeley
Peter Wakker, Erasmus University
Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Lee Fleming, Harvard University
Kamalini Ramdas, London Business School
Finance
Brad M. Barber, University of California, Davis
Wei Xiong, Princeton University
Information Systems
Lorin Hitt, University of Pennsylvania
Sandra Slaughter, Georgia Institute of Technology
Marketing
Pradeep Chintagunta, University of Chicago
Preyas Desai, Duke University
Operations Management
Yossi Aviv, Washington University
Martin Lariviere, Northwestern University
Christian Terwiesch, University of Pennsylvania
Optimization
Dimitris Bertsimas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Organizations
Jesper Sørensen, Stanford University
Stochastic Models and Simulation
Assaf Zeevi, Columbia University
Associate Editors
Accounting
Tim Baldenius, Columbia University
Mary E. Barth, Stanford University
Patricia Dechow, University of California, Berkeley
Sunil Dutta, University of California, Berkeley
Paul Fischer, Pennsylvania State University
Chris Ittner, University of Pennsylvania
William Lanen, University of Michigan
V.G. Narayanan, Harvard University
Business Strategy
Ron Adner, Dartmouth College
Juan Alcacer, Harvard University
Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Harvard University
Andrea Fosfuri, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Steven Klepper, Carnegie Mellon University
Glenn MacDonald,Washington University in St. Louis
Anita McGahan, University of Toronto
Joanne Oxley, University of Toronto
Jan Rivkin, Harvard University
Decision Analysis
Wilfred Amaldoss, Duke University
Manel Baucells, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Shlomo Benartzi, University of California, Los Angeles
Han Bleichrodt, Erasmus University
Yan Chen, University of Michigan
Henry Chiu, University of Manchester
Enrico De Giorgi, University of St. Gallen
Matthias Ehrgott, University of Auckland
Christian Gollier, University of Toulouse
Shachar Kariv, University of California, Berkeley
Rick Larrick, Duke University
Yuval Rottenstreich, New York University
Rakesh Sarin, University of California, Los Angeles
Xuanming Su, University of California, Berkeley
Georg Weizsäcker, London School of Economics
Robert Winkler, Duke University
Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Ajay Agrawal, University of Toronto
Ashish Arora, Duke University
Rajesh Chandy, London Business School and University of Minnesota
Robin Cowan, University of Strasbourg
David Hsu, University of Pennsylvania
Nitin Joglekar, Boston University
Stylianos Kavadias, Georgia Institute of Technology
William Kerr, Harvard University
Laura Kornish, University of Colorado
Vish Krishnan, University of California, San Diego
Michael Lenox, University of Virginia
Christoph Loch, INSEAD
Jasjit Singh, INSEAD
Marie Thursby, Georgia Institute of Technology
Karl Ulrich, University of Pennsylvania
David Waguespack, University of Maryland
Arvids Ziedonis, University of Michigan
Finance
Viral Acharya, New York University
Gary Charness, University of California, Santa Barbara
Joseph Chen, University of California, Davis
Pierre Collin-Dufresne, Columbia University
Josh Coval, Harvard University
Jerome Detemple, Boston University
Simon Gervais, Duke University
Itay Goldstein, University of Pennsylvania
Terrence Hendershott, University of California, Berkeley
Christopher Hennessy, London Business School
Wei Jiang, Columbia University
Michael Johannes, Columbia University
Leonid Kogan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Charles Lee, Stanford University
Haitao Li, University of Michigan
Jeff Pontiff, Boston College
Adriano Rampini, Duke University
Michael Roberts, University of Pennsylvania
Paola Sapienza, Northwestern University
Clemens Sialm, University of Texas, Austin
Ronnie Sircar, Princeton University
Luis Viceira, Harvard University
Neng Wang, Columbia University
Zhenyu Wang, Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Jeff Wurgler, New York University
Lu Zhang, University of Michigan
Information Systems
Amit Basu, Southern Methodist University
Anandhi Bharadwaj, Emory University
Wai Fong Boh, Nanyang Technological University
Pei-Yu Chen, Temple University
Chris Dellarocas, Boston University
Sanjeev Dewan, University of California, Irvine
Robert G. Fichman, Boston College
Chris Forman, Georgia Institute of Technology
Anindya Ghose, New York University
Alok Gupta, University of Minnesota
Il-Horn Hann, University of Maryland
Elena Karahanna, University of Georgia
Vijay Mookerjee, University of Texas at Dallas
Waleed Muhanna, Ohio State University
Edieal Pinker, University of Rochester
Sumit Sarkar, University of Texas at Dallas
Kate Stewart, University of Maryland
Yong Tan, University of Washington
Rahul Telang, Carnegie Mellon University
D. J. Wu, Georgia Institute of Technology
Marketing
Andrew Ainslie, University of California, Los Angeles
Asim Ansari, Columbia University
Doug Bowman, Emory University
Bart Bronnenberg, Tilburg University
Yuxin Chen, Northwestern University
J. P. Dube, University of Chicago
Avi Goldfarb, University of Toronto
Ganesh Iyer, University of California, Berkeley
Aradhna Krishna, University of Michigan
Dmitri Kuksov, Washington University in St. Louis
Puneet Manchanda, University of Michigan
Elie Ofek, Harvard University
Debu Purohit, Duke University
Priya Raghubir, New York University
Duncan Simester, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Kannan Srinivasan, Carnegie Mellon University
K. Sudhir, Yale University
Rajeev Tyagi, University of California, Irvine
Naufel Vilcassim, London Business School
Miguel Villas-Boas, University of California, Berkeley
Florian Zettelmeyer, Northwestern University
John Zhang, University of Pennsylvania
Operations Management
Daniel Adelman, University of Chicago
Volodymyr Babich, University of Michigan
Fernando Bernstein, Duke University
Laurens Debo, University of Chicago
Ling Dong, Washington University
Karen Donohue, University of Minnesota
Wedad Elmaghraby, University of Maryland
Jeremie Gallien, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Noah Gans, University of Pennsylvania
Vishal Gaur, Cornell University
Stephen Gilbert, University of Texas, Austin
Albert Ha, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Robert Huckman, Harvard University
Ganesh Janakiraman, University of Texas, Dallas
Fikri Karaesmen, Koç University
Michael Lapré, Vanderbilt University
Yuri Levin, Queens University
Mahesh Nagarajan, University of British Columbia
Serguei Netessine, University of Pennsylvania
Tava Olsen, Washington University in St. Louis
Özalp Özer, University of Texas, Dallas
Nicholas Petruzzi, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Michael Pinedo, New York University
Erica Plambeck, Stanford University
Ioana Popescu, INSEAD
Sergei Savin, University of Pennsylvania
Kevin Shang, Duke University
Rob Shumsky, Dartmouth College
Vinod Singhal, Georgia Institute of Technology
Xuanming Su, University of California, Berkeley
Terry Taylor, University of California, Berkeley
Beril Toktay, Georgia Institute of Technology
Brian Tomlin, Dartmouth College
Gustavo Vulcano, New York University
Fuqiang Zhang, Washington University in St. Louis
Optimization
Aharon Ben Tal, Technion
Garud Iyengar, Columbia University
Anton Kleywegt, Georgia Institute of Technology
Retsef Levi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Andrea Lodi, University of Bologna
Tom Luo, University of Minnesota
Georgia Perakis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
R. Ravi, Carnegie Mellon University
Melvyn Sim, National University of Singapore
Chung Piaw Teo, National University of Singapore
Organizations
Jonathon Cummings, Duke University
Jerker Denrell, Oxford University
Hillary Anger Elfenbein, Washington University in St. Louis
Sendil Ethiraj, University of Michigan
Greta Hsu, University of California, Davis
Arturs Kalnins, Cornell University
James Moody, Duke University
Peter Thompson, Florida International University
Ezra Zuckerman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stochastic Models and Simulation
Mor Armony, New York University
Baris Ata, Northwestern University
Steve Chick, INSEAD
William Cooper, University of Minnesota
Shane Henderson, Cornell University
Ramesh Johari, Stanford University
Costis Maglaras, Columbia University
Alan Scheller-Wolf, Carnegie Mellon University
Yong-Pin Zhou, University of Washington