Dear Colleagues and Friends,
I hope you and your family are safe and healthy!
You may recall that in my editorial at the beginning of the year I described a wish and a challenge:
"Moving forward, I have a wish and a challenge with respect to data and replicability. My wish is to appoint a Management Science data editor whose role is to ensure that accepted papers comply with the Data and Code Disclosure Policy and to verify the ability to replicate results published by the journal. One possible question is whether this should be done at the journal level with a scholar, or at the society level with a data scientist responsible for multiple journals. In fact, it is possible that we need a hybrid strategy with editors both at the journal level and the society level. More on this initiative will be coming in the near future. The challenge is for the Management Science community. The editorial board would like to publish a paper, likely a Fast Track paper, that reports replicability of laboratory experiments published by Management Science. This was done in economics (Camerer et al. 2016), and in social science (Camerer et al. 2018), and it is time to do the same for Management Science papers."
I can now report on both initiatives.
The Wish: After consultation with many in the community, I am pleased to report that Ben Greiner from WU Vienna (Vienna University of Economics and Business) has accepted my invitation to serve as Management Science's first Data Editor. You can read the Data Editor's mission statement. Milos Fisar and Ali Özkes from WU Vienna have agreed to support Ben and the journal in this work and serve as part of the Management Science's Data Editorial Team.
The Challenge: In the last few months I have collaborated with Yan Chen, Axel Ockenfels, Colin Camerer, and Anna Dreber Almenberg on the replicability challenge. As many of you know, Colin led a similar project in Economics and Social Science and Anna wrote a paper on how replication should be done in the social sciences. This collaboration provided significant insight on the papers' selection process; the importance of choosing an experienced and reputable team to conduct replicability; the needs and means for providing transparency, prior to the start of lab experiments, to authors whose work is being replicated so the original authors can provide direct feedback to the team; and, the need to provide transparency to the community and to apply processes to avoid COI challenges.
I am pleased to report we now have a team of eight academics (with significant experience in behavioral operations) committed to addressing the replicability challenge. The team includes members from five institutes with established labs, which will allow us to conduct each replication in multiple locations. The faculty involved include Andrew Davis, Cornell University, Blair Flicker, University of South Carolina, Kyle Hyndman and Elena Katok, University of Texas at Dallas, Samantha Keppler and Stephen Leider, University of Michigan, Xiaoyang Long and Jordan Tong, University of Wisconsin. Of course, we all recognize we will face delays in this initiative due to the pandemic, but, for now, we can establish process details, identify the papers to replicate, provide transparency to, and receive feedback from the community.
As always please send me any comments or suggestions.
David Simchi-Levi
Editor-in-Chief
Management Science
E-mail: mseic@mit.edu
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David Simchi-Levi
Professor of Engineering Systems
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge MA
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