There’s been much talk already of the agreement among law reviews to leave offers open at least seven days. But Al Roth adds to the mix the following observation:
I notice that none of the journals signing the letter have made the more difficult promise not to respond to exploding offers from less prestigious journals. So there will still be incentives for authors to try to move up the prestige ranking of law journals by first soliciting offers from lower ranked journals, and then trying to turn these into hasty acceptances from higher ranked journals.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Roth was here for a faculty workshop recently. Though the formal discussion topic was organ donation, dinner and other informal conversations included talk of market unraveling generally, and about exploding offers, particularly. I learned a lot from these conversations, and realized that there were many features of market unraveling that I had not understood before.
Roth has written several articles on the effect of exploding offers in various markets, including:
Niederle, Muriel, and Alvin E. Roth, "Market Culture: How Rules Governing Exploding Offers Affect Market Performance," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 1, 2, August 2009, 199-219.
Avery, Christopher, Christine Jolls, Richard A. Posner, and Alvin E. Roth, "The Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks" University of Chicago Law Review, 68, 3, Summer, 2001, 793-902.(online at SSRN)
Avery, Christopher, Jolls, Christine, Posner, Richard A. and Roth, Alvin E., "The New Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks" . University of Chicago Law Review, 74, Spring 2007, 447-486.