Failure in the market for reviewing economics papers: Good readers, bad referees, and ugly papers

The paper discusses the problem of incompetent and/or irresponsible refereeing of scientific papers, with emphasis on economics papers. To illustrate, I describe my own confrontation with erroneous published papers, and demonstrate that writing comments on such papers does not always solve the problem. Finally, based on previously suggested as well as on currently used solutions, I propose a change in the review process by abolishing referee anonymity and letting the authors appeal publicly if they think their papers have been evaluated improperly. This change will render the process self-correcting.