Announcement from American Economic Association: Recent feedback received from some AEA members and from the intersociety Report on Improving the Publication Process in Economics* raised concerns about the perceived unfairness of single-blind peer reviewing. In response to these concerns, the AEA will soon be launching a three-year randomized controlled trial of the effects of author-anonymized peer reviewing, commonly referred to as "double-blind."
Blank (1991) previously conducted a randomized evaluation of double-blind vs. single-blind peer reviewing at the American Economic Review (AER).** The current evaluation will involve the AER, AER: Insights, and the four American Economic Journals.
In the treatment group, information revealing author identities will be excluded from materials provided to reviewers, and reviewers will be asked to refrain from seeking them out through web searches or other means. The experiment will test the effects of removing author identities from the information routinely provided to reviewers, while recognizing that reviewers may become aware of author identities in other ways.
Key outcomes that will be examined include (1) author and reviewer perceptions of fairness, (2) reviewer awareness of author identities in the treatment (author-anonymized) group, and (3) differential impacts of author-anonymized review on manuscript decisions by characteristics of the authors and their papers.
The experimental design, implementation, and analysis are being conducted by Amy Finkelstein (MIT) and staff from J-PAL North America, in consultation with the AEA. J-PAL North America is a research center specializing in RCTs, where Finkelstein serves as co-scientific director. Finkelstein will not have access to identified information on individual manuscript submissions.
We expect the experiment to be launched in fall 2026...
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Full announcement at https://www.aeaweb.org/news/member-announcements/2026-sept-10.
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**https://www.jstor.org/stable/2006906. Abstract: The results from a randomized experiment conducted at The American Economic Review on the effects of double-blind versus single-blind peer reviewing on acceptance rates and referee ratings indicate that acceptance rates are lower and referees are more critical when the reviewer is unaware of the author's identity. These patterns are not significantly different between female and male authors. Authors at top-ranked universities and at colleges and low-ranked universities are largely unaffected by the different reviewing practices, but authors at near-top-ranked universities and at nonacademic institutions have lower acceptance rates under double-blind reviewing.
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