The Optimal Order for Submitting Manuscripts
推导了向经济学期刊投稿的最优策略，考虑接受概率、等待成本与期刊质量，帮助学者决定投稿顺序。
There have been a number of articles written in the last few years describing the attributes of various economics journals, including their quality, acceptance practices, and so on.' Presumably one could use these data both to determine which journals to buy and read, and to which journals to submit one's papers. This paper is concerned with the latter issue; in particular, I derive the optimal strategy for submitting manuscripts to economics journals. The problem is one which we all face periodically: to which of the many available journals should a paper be sent? For highly specialized papers, the answer is sometimes obvious. In many cases, however, any one of several journals may be appropriate. This is the case dealt with in this paper. The first problem in doing this analysis was to decide what the individual might be trying to accomplish by his or her journal choice. In general cases of this sort, one might suppose that individuals made decisions in order to maximize some kind of pecuniary return. This did not seem a fruitful way to model the individual's choice of journal. If we were really interested solely in maximizing pecuniary returns, we probably wouldn't write papers at all. In this paper, two alternative objective functions were used to represent more or less extreme, but plausible, cases: journal choice based on maximizing the stream of points from an article versus journal choice based on maximizing the discounted stream of readers of the article. Clearly, both prestige and readership affect one's income; nevertheless these objective functions seemed to be somewhat more general than the strict rate-of-return case. The choice process has the following characteristics. For each journal i, there is some probability, Pi, that the paper will be accepted. If it is accepted, the article earns its author a discounted stream of benefits over his or her lifetime. If the article is rejected by the first journal, it can then be submitted to a second journal, or a third. If there were no costs to a rejection, one would always adopt the strategy of first submission to the best journal. As it is, there is a cost to being rejected (other than the obvious psychic one): the rejection process takes time and while one is waiting the article obsolesces, tenure slots fill up with other people, and so on. In short, one trades off waiting against the quality of journal that finally accepts the article. The formal optimization problem can be set up as follows. For each ordering of the n journals, there is a potential stream of benefits. For the ordering 1, 2, 3, 4, ..., n, for example, the benefits may be represented as: