geb-topic-selection

Topic Selection (geb-topic-selection)

When to trigger

• You have a model or experiment but are unsure it is "GEB-sized"
• The result is correct but feels incremental over a known theorem
• You are deciding between GEB and a field outlet (theory, behavioral, CS/EC venue)
• A referee or colleague said "true, but so what?"

The GEB fit bar

GEB is the leading specialist game-theory journal and an official journal of the Game Theory Society (Elsevier; founded 1989 by Ehud Kalai; chief editor Hervé Moulin since 2021). The defining test is not general-economics policy interest — it is whether the work significantly advances the frontiers of game theory and its applications. The scope is deliberately broad across methods: equilibrium theory, mechanism and market design, behavioral game theory, learning and dynamics, and experimental/empirical work — and broad across fields that use game theory: economics, political science, biology, computer science, mathematics, and psychology. The audience is a general game-theory readership, so the contribution must be legible and interesting beyond one narrow sub-literature.

Selectivity is explicit and high: about one-third of submissions are desk-rejected, and only ~15% are eventually published. The Editor in Charge will desk-reject papers judged to have no chance of meeting the publication criterion. That makes "what does this teach game theory that we did not know?" the first-page question.

Fit tests (a GEB paper usually clears several)

• Conceptual advance: a new solution concept, a sharper characterization, a new class of games, an existence/uniqueness result, or a unifying framework.
• Mechanism / design advance: a new mechanism, an impossibility/possibility result, an optimal or constructive design.
• Behavioral advance: a model or experiment that changes how strategic behavior is understood, well-identified against alternatives.
• Generality / surprise: the result holds more broadly than expected, or overturns an intuition.
• Cross-field reach: game-theoretic content that speaks to CS/EC, biology, or political science — common at GEB, but it must still be a game-theory contribution.

Anti-patterns

• A correct but routine extension ("Theorem 1 with one more player") with no new insight
• An applied paper that uses a game but contributes nothing to game theory itself (better at a field journal)
• A pure CS/EC conference result reframed with no added generality or economic interpretation
• Over-claiming a narrow special case as a general theory

Fit pass for Games and Economic Behavior

Treat this skill as an executable review pass, not a prose hint. First lock the primitives, equilibrium concept, comparative statics, and proof or experiment boundary; then judge whether the current manuscript answers the venue's real reader: game theorists who ask what the model teaches beyond a clever example.

• Do the pass: Score the manuscript on venue fit, novelty, evidence readiness, and audience ownership; reject a prestige-only target when a sibling venue owns the contribution more directly.
• Return a ledger: give claim / evidence / risk / manuscript location rows, so the next agent can edit rather than rediscover the issue.
• Sibling guard: compare against JET for theory abstraction, Theoretical Economics for compact theory contribution, Experimental Economics for experiment-first designs; if a sibling owns the contribution, recommend re-routing before polishing format.
• Stop condition: do not give submission-ready advice until the pack's resources/official-source-map.md has been checked for volatile rules and the manuscript has one concrete fix for the largest venue-specific risk.

Output format

【Result type】theory / mechanism design / behavioral / experiment / cross-field
【Advance to game theory】one sentence — what we did not know before
【Fit tests cleared】[conceptual / design / behavioral / generality / cross-field]
【Desk-reject risk】low / medium / high — why
【Verdict】GEB-fit / borderline / better elsewhere
【Next step】geb-literature-positioning