Rejecting rejections—seeking acceptance of experimental economics in economics journals

Abstract This paper addresses a central question of the experimental turn in economics: how a relatively small group of experimental economists in the 1970s and 1980s managed to convince editors and referees of leading economics journals of the merits of the experimental method. The consequence of this was that, by the early 1990s, experimental economics research became a standard feature of economics journals and of the economics mainstream. I draw on a unique—and, to this date, never utilized—corpus of referee reports (and related correspondence) by Charles Plott, one of the leading pioneers of experimental economics. His publication corpus is used as a case study of how experimental economists sought acceptance in economics journals. I describe a set of nine strategies that he and other early experimental economists used to convince journal editors and referees who had no direct experience with conducting economic experiments of the merits of the experimental method.