Elsevier’s Non-Renewal of an Editor-in-Chief Triggers a Mass Resignation at Games and Economic Behavior

What happened: In late July 2026, Elsevier notified Hervé Moulin — a game theorist at the University of Glasgow and editor-in-chief of Games and Economic Behavior (GEB) since January 2021 — that his six-year tenure would end in December and would not be renewed. Elsevier has not publicly detailed its reasoning. In the weeks that followed, according to an internal email dated August 16, 2026, all six of the journal’s editors resigned in solidarity. By August 19, 58 of the journal’s 62 advisory editors had also resigned, according to Retraction Watch, which logged the episode as entry #57 on its running Mass Resignations List. The remaining skeleton editorial team is reportedly continuing to handle new submissions only through November 14, after which the journal’s editorial capacity is unclear.

Why this journal, specifically

Games and Economic Behavior is one of the field-defining journals in game theory and mathematical economics, founded with backing from the Game Theory Society and long treated as a top-tier outlet for tenure and promotion cases in economics and adjacent quantitative social science departments. A publisher declining to renew an editor-in-chief’s contract is not unusual on its own; a near-total, coordinated resignation of both the editorial board and the much larger advisory-editor pool in response is a strong public signal from a scholarly community that it viewed the decision as an attack on editorial independence rather than a routine transition — the same category of dispute CASRAI has tracked elsewhere this year, including the fight over Diabetes Care‘s editorial independence after police removed scientists from an ADA meeting and Clarivate’s decision to place an entire Springer Nature surgery journal group on a Web of Science hold.

What it means if you have a stake in this journal

Authors with manuscripts under review at GEB should expect delay and possible reviewer churn: an advisory board resigning en masse typically also means many working peer reviewers are gone, since advisory editors are usually a journal’s deepest reviewer bench, not just a nominal masthead.

Departments citing GEB placements in tenure and promotion files should watch whether Elsevier appoints a successor editorial team the field regards as legitimate, or whether authors and reviewers begin steering submissions elsewhere (a competing venue, a society-run alternative, or a diamond open-access outlet) — a pattern that has previously caused a journal’s effective standing to diverge from its historical impact factor faster than bibliometric indicators catch up.

Research offices advising early-career game theorists and economists on where to submit should treat GEB’s editorial capacity as unsettled through at least the stated November 14 cutoff, and confirm current editorial leadership directly with the journal before recommending it as a safe placement for time-sensitive tenure-clock submissions.

CASRAI’s guide to impartiality and conflicts of interest in peer review and dictionary entries on editorial independence and the co-editor-in-chief role cover the governance mechanics at stake when a publisher and an editorial board disagree about who controls a journal’s direction — useful background for evaluating how GEB’s situation, and any successor arrangement Elsevier proposes, compares with normal editorial succession.