The Editor believes the probability of acceptance is insufficient to cause the authors to wait for the outcome of a full review. For example, the manuscript might be a poor fit with the journal or the manuscript might fail to provide new findings over the extant literature.

We are unable to publish this manuscript. Usually, the manuscript has one or more of the following deficiencies.
(1) The manuscript contains errors or difficult to correct flaws.
(2) The manuscript fails to make a sufficient contribution.
(3) Parts of the manuscript are incomprehensible.
(4) The manuscript fails to answer a research question of interest to our readers.
The manuscript should be revised and submitted elsewhere.

We are unable to publish this manuscript in its current form. Moreover, we are unable to provide specific advice regarding revisions because we are unable to predict the best way to improve, for example, the manuscript’s incremental contribution. However, we find the basic research question interesting and the research stream to have potential. Therefore, we would like to see a future manuscript after the research is more developed. At that point, the manuscript is assigned to an entirely new review team.

We are sufficiently comfortable with the manuscript to recommend specific and general revisions. When the revision returns, we will send it back to the same review team, if it is possible to do so (sometimes, team members are unavailable). Note that there are sometimes substantive hurdles to overcoming the concerns of the AE and the reviewers. Also, there are risks associated with the uncertain results of new analyses and requests for additional information revealing previously undiscovered problems. Hence, invitations to revise fail to insure ultimate publication. We view major revisions as having more risk because they involve clarifying more issues and providing more new analyses than minor revisions.  The uncertain outcome of new analysis, new data collection, etc. add more uncertainty to the outcome of the review process.

The manuscript is publishable conditional on straightforward and easily communicated revisions. The manuscript is usually sent back only to the AE and the editor.

The manuscript is publishable except for corrections associated with copywriting editing.

Comments on the Marketing Science website are welcome ( marketingscience@cba.ufl.edu).

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Master Index.