Writing Style (mksc-writing-style)

When to trigger

• The paper buries its intuition under notation; an editor cannot grasp the contribution from the first pages
• Notation is dense, inconsistent, or introduced before motivation
• Citations/formatting are not in INFORMS style
• You are doing a final pass before submission (and the model is settled)

Lead with intuition, then formalize

Marketing Science readers are technical, but the intuition must come first. State the marketing question, the mechanism, and the headline counterfactual in words before the model appears. Each major result should be previewed in plain language ("intuitively, because firms re-optimize prices, …") and only then proven. Notation is a tool for precision, not a substitute for an argument.

• Introduce notation just-in-time, near where it is used; keep a consistent, minimal symbol set; consider a notation table for heavy models.
• For analytical results, state the proposition in words, give the economic intuition, then the formal claim; push long proofs to an appendix.
• For structural work, motivate each modeling assumption by the marketing institution it captures.

INFORMS house style