Departmental Editorial Statements
Accounting
Mary E. Barth, Stanford University
This department seeks to publish innovative research on the interrelation between managerial decisions and accounting information. This agenda includes research in managerial accounting as it relates to cost and profitability analysis, internal pricing, performance measurement, and control. The agenda also includes financial accounting as it examines the decision usefulness of accounting information to external parties such as the firm’s investors, creditors, suppliers, competitors, and customers. In terms of research methodology, the department invites a range of alternative approaches including theoretical, empirical, and experimental studies. Field studies are also welcome provided the insights from the study are likely to extend beyond the particular setting. Because Management Science publishes articles in several management disciplines, the editors particularly encourage the submission of manuscripts that are of interest not only to accounting researchers but also to the wide readership in neighboring disciplines such as operations management, strategy, and marketing.
Behavioral Economics
Uri Gneezy, University of California at San Diego
Teck-Hua Ho, National University of Singapore and University of California, Berkeley
John List, University of Chicago
The Behavioral Economics Department seeks to publish original research broadly related to behavioral economics. We welcome laboratory experiments, field studies, and empirical and theoretical papers. The goal of this department is to promote research on incentives and behavior in domains such as markets, groups, and individual decision making. In the cross-disciplinary tradition of Management Science, we encourage research that draws ideas from multiple disciplines including economics, psychology, sociology, and statistics to provide novel insights on behavioral economics. In all cases, manuscripts should provide high-quality original approaches to behavioral economics, should be motivated such that the importance of the results is clear to nonspecialists, and should have important managerial implications for business and public policy.
Business Strategy
Bruno Cassiman, IESE and K. U. Leuven
In identifying potential publications within the Business Strategy Department, two basic criteria are considered. First, does the work conform to rigorous standards of quality in the development of the theoretical argument and in any empirical analysis? Second, does the work address important and central questions of strategy? In particular, the department aspires to nurture and publish a strand of work that has strong theoretical underpinnings applied to interesting empirical phenomena of relevance to the strategy field.
The department takes a broad view of what might constitute such a theoretical underpinning and an interesting empirical phenomenon. This breadth is reflected in the range of topics it includes and which might not immediately find a home in other field journals. Furthermore, our breadth is reflected by the range of alternative disciplines considered relevant, including political science, sociology, economics, and psychology. Although eclectic in the sources of the underlying theory, the department is nevertheless stringent on its presence in an explicit and clearly articulated form. In other words, there is a strong bias in favor of work that develops a formal account of processes underlying observed empirical phenomena.
Decision Analysis
Rakesh Sarin, University of California, Los Angeles
The Decision Analysis Department seeks papers that introduce new concepts and techniques for modeling decisions. Papers may develop original theory or methodology, address problems of implementation, present empirical studies of choice behavior or decision modeling, synthesize existing ideas, or describe innovative field applications. In all cases, the papers must be based on sound economic or psychological principles and have a prescriptive focus.
Decision settings may be deterministic or stochastic, competitive or noncompetitive, static or dynamic. Applications may include improving managerial decisions in business or government. The editors are open to articles in areas including marketing, finance, economics, psychology, operations research, accounting, health care, and public policy. Interdisciplinary articles that cut across multiple areas are particularly welcomed.
Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Lee Fleming, Harvard University
David Hsu, University of Pennsylvania
This department considers research on entrepreneurship and innovation. Entrepreneurship includes new business creation as well as entrepreneurial activities undertaken within existing businesses or through new market mechanisms. Innovation includes novel and creative ways to create value through new products or services, new business models, or new processes.
Topics of interest to this department include (but are not limited to) new venture formation processes, financing, and strategies; R&D and project management, performance metrics, and portfolio evaluation; institutions and policies to enhance entrepreneurship and innovation; markets for ideas, innovation, and other intangibles; regional and global dynamics of entrepreneurship and innovation; university and science-based innovation and technology transfer; continuous improvement and new process development; new product development, development processes, and service design; patents, licensing, and intellectual property; business model innovation (e.g., operations, marketing, or network innovation); open innovation and distributed innovation; and market and financial impact of innovation.
The principal review criteria for papers in the department are as follows: (i) Does the paper use or develop a theoretical framework to address a question of managerial importance and relevance? (ii) Does the paper use appropriate methodology to answer the question convincingly and rigorously? (iii) Ultimately, does it change our thinking on an important topic in entrepreneurship or innovation?
Most successful papers will be grounded by phenomenological understanding or built from illustrative examples. Papers that are purely theoretical or conceptual in nature must be well motivated and connected in a substantial and realistic way to a problem of managerial importance. Because most problems in entrepreneurship and innovation are inherently crossfunctional and/or interdisciplinary, papers submitted to this department need not adhere to a particular disciplinary or methodological approach.
Finance
Brad M. Barber, University of California, Davis
Jerome Detemple, Boston University
Wei Jiang, Columbia University
The Finance Department seeks papers on topics that deal with the finance area broadly defined. We look for work that is creative, insightful, and significant. We welcome papers from all fields of finance and encourage applications to a broad range of problems related to management. We are interested in both the creation of new theoretical models and extensions of existing theory. The department also encourages articles that conduct rigorous empirical and/or quantitative tests of existing theories. We especially encourage papers with strong implications for the finance aspect of management practice, e.g., applications to asset management, financial institutions, behavioral finance, corporate finance, and risk management.
Papers must be written in a clear and concise manner and should be motivated in a way that explains the importance of the results to a nonspecialist. Authors of empirical and quantitative papers should provide or make available enough information and data so that the results are reproducible. Authors of theoretical papers should place complicated technical derivations in appendices.
Information Systems
Lorin Hitt, University of Pennsylvania
Sandra Slaughter, Georgia Institute of Technology
The objective of the Information Systems Department is to publish groundbreaking and distinctive research that addresses the interplay between managerial decisions and information technologies and systems, including issues relating to the development, deployment and use of information technology, as well as the impact of information technology on the economy, industries, organizations, processes, and individuals.
Research submitted to the Information Systems Department may draw on a wide variety of disciplines including economics, mathematics, psychology, sociology, computer science, and statistics. Research methods may include economic modeling, operations research modeling, laboratory experiments, and analyses of archival, survey, or field data. Regardless of reference discipline or research method, all research published must meet a high standard of rigor and credibility, and the results should be of broad interest to management scholars and represent an advance in the frontier of knowledge.
Judgment and Decision Making
Yuval Rottenstreich, New York University
The Judgment and Decision Making department seeks papers that investigate the beliefs and preferences of individuals and small groups. Papers should be empirically oriented. New findings should be presented against the backdrop of prior findings or rigorous models. New theories should integrate extant findings. The department is especially interested in analyses that draw on psychological accounts of beliefs and preferences. Relevant psychological accounts may implicate perceptual, cognitive, affective, or social factors.
Paper topics should clearly connect to real-world managerial decisions. Specific topics of interest include but are certainly not limited to: prediction; assessments of confidence; perceptions of randomness; judgments of covariation and causation; hypothesis testing; counterfactual reasoning; optimism and pessimism; risk perception; choice under uncertainty; intertemporal choice; self-control and self-regulation; resolution of tradeoffs or conflicting objectives; the evaluation of outcomes and decisions; reference points; debiasing; well-being; small group dynamics; negotiation and strategic interaction; power and status; morality, fairness, ethics, and justice; and considerations of rationality.
Marketing
Pradeep Chintagunta, University of Chicago
Miguel Villas-Boas, University of California, Berkeley
The Marketing Department seeks to publish papers that address important marketing questions. Topics of interest include, among others, marketing strategy, product line management, new product development and launch, design and management of distribution channels, sales-force management, pricing, advertising, promotions, buyer behavior, and demand estimation. Because of the journal’s cross-functional readership, the Marketing Department particularly welcomes interdisciplinary work on the interface between marketing and other functional areas.
We are open to a diverse set of methodologies and paradigms including surveys, experiments, econometric and statistical data analyses, economic modeling, and applications. While we are open to all methodologies, we look for manuscripts that apply the chosen methodology rigorously.
The best manuscripts address problems that are both important and faced by a broad segment of marketing practitioners. Furthermore, they make an original and significant contribution to the marketing literature. A theoretical manuscript should explain why certain managerial actions are optimal, or why certain marketing institutions and practices are desirable. A methodological manuscript should provide new methods leading to superior actions relative to existing methods. An empirical manuscript should provide either new empirical generalizations or new insights that can improve marketing practice. Applications-oriented manuscripts should describe implementation of leading-edge methods or models that can have significant managerial consequences.
Operations Management
Yossi Aviv, Washington University in St. Louis
Martin Lariviere, Northwestern University
Serguei Netessine, INSEAD
Operations Management concerns the design, production, and delivery of goods and services. The Operations Management Department will publish research in established areas of operations management such as supply chain management, production planning, service operations, revenue management, quality management, and process design and improvement. Beyond these traditional areas, we are also interested in promoting research on emerging topics such as sustainable operations, energy efficiency, homeland security, and emergency response. We encourage submissions of studies related to private and public sectors, as well as industry-specific research such as retail, energy, and health care.
The department is open to both analytical and empirical research. Successful analytical papers will use sound modeling techniques drawn from the fields of mathematical optimization, stochastic processes, statistics, simulation, and game theory. Although rigorous execution is necessary, it is not sufficient for publication. For example, manuscripts whose primary contribution is developing and studying new mathematical methods should be submitted to a more methodologically oriented department within Management Science.
A successful empirical paper will have an appropriate research design, use sound econometric analysis, and, most importantly, explicitly relate its research questions and methods to operations management theory of interest. Such connection to theory must be well articulated and ground the presentation of main research hypotheses, the explanation of data collection procedures, and the choice of metrics.
The department welcomes interdisciplinary research. Although interactions are possible with a wide range of disciplines, we anticipate significant opportunities in the intersections between operations management and accounting, marketing, and finance. As with other manuscripts, the evaluation of such research will be based on the extent to which it creates significant and novel insights for operations management.
Independent of its methodology, we expect manuscripts to be of interest to a broad audience in operations management and, ideally, beyond. Specifically, the contribution of a manuscript will be evaluated based not on how the results were obtained, but on whether it delivers novel and interesting insights.
Optimization
Dimitris Bertsimas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Optimization Department seeks contributions on all aspects of optimization and its applications. This includes methodology, computation, and applications. Accepted papers are expected to score highly in at least one of the following questions: (i) How new and significant is the application studied? (ii) How original/ creative is the optimization modeling? (iii) How original/creative is the optimization methodology? (iv) How significant is the impact in practice?
A nonexclusive list of methodologies that the department covers is as follows: convex optimization (including linear optimization); general-purpose nonlinear optimization; discrete optimization (combinatorial, integer, and mixed-integer programming); optimization under uncertainty (dynamic programming, stochastic programming, robust optimization, simulation-based optimization); infinite-dimensional optimization; equilibrium problems and game theory.
Especially welcome are contributions studying new and significant applications. A nonexclusive list of application areas the department covers includes health care, inventory and supply chain management, logistics, revenue management and pricing, energy, the Internet, data mining/statistics, interfaces with computer science, and finance.
Authors are expected to write succinctly, with a clear articulation of their contributions and main results so as to address a broad audience of scholars interested in optimization methods and applications.
Organizations
Jesper Sørensen, Stanford University
The Organizations Department seeks submissions in the broad field of organizational behavior and theory; of interest are papers that examine the factors that influence the behavior and characteristics of organizations in their environments, the formal and informal features of organizations, and individual and group processes within organizations. Work should be of broad interest to the community of management scholars studying organizations. A broad range of perspectives is welcome, including sociology, psychology, economics, and multidisciplinary approaches.
Manuscripts will be assessed primarily in terms of the extent to which they exhibit novelty and rigor. Novelty is defined in relationship to the existing theoretical and empirical literature on organizations. Papers may exhibit novelty in any of a variety of ways, including the articulation of new theoretical mechanisms or processes, the resolution of established theoretical and empirical puzzles, or the use of novel data, methods, or research designs to adjudicate between competing perspectives. All papers, whether primarily theoretical or empirical in emphasis, must meet Management Science’s standards of rigor. The Organizations Department does not define rigor in terms of any particular methodological approach; rigor may be achieved in many multiple ways, including (among others) the use of formal modeling, simulations, ethnographic approaches, laboratory and field experiments, and the statistical analysis of survey or archival data.
Stochastic Models and Simulation
Assaf Zeevi, Columbia University
The Stochastic Models and Simulation Department seeks to publish work that contributes to the modeling, analysis, or simulation of stochastic systems, broadly construed, through advances in methodology and/or application. These advances may stem from the development of new methods and models and/or creative applications of existing ones.
In terms of methodological areas, the department is interested in a broad range of topics that pertain to the management of stochastic systems and more broadly address decision making under uncertainty. Examples of relevant problem areas include manufacturing, inventory and production management, service operations, revenue management, financial engineering, and information services. Methodological contributions to these areas may take the form of novel analytical, computational, simulation-based, or statistical methods. The department is interested in contributions that emphasize new applications of stochastic methods, and we are particularly eager to attract papers in emerging application areas, for example, Web-enabled and information services. Furthermore, we welcome papers that focus on the synergies between traditional operations research methods and adjacent fields, such as statistics and economics, and their implications on the design and analysis of stochastic systems.
The department places particular emphasis on the originality and breadth of the approach as well as the quality of the results. Ideally these should transcend the specifics of the motivating problem but at the same time should remain grounded and avoid focusing on abstract theory per se. Although rigor plays an important role in assessing submissions, it is by no means sufficient, and a greater premium is placed on the novelty of the problem being studied and its overall importance and value to the Management Science community.