Motivation of a paper from referee reports

Question

I have been working on an article (in mathematical economics) for some time now and received many comments from referee reports on the use of a functional form that is commonly used in the literature on the topic. While previous reports have criticized its use, this particular comment commonly pointed out by reviewers inspired me to write a whole new paper, as it was not feasible to change everything in the existing 50-page article.

My question is whether it would be appropriate to give references or credits to the referee reports as a motivation point in the new paper because my real motivation for the new paper stems from this specific point, which has not been discussed in the literature

Answer 1

I think it would be appropriate to add something on this to the Acknowledgements section, perhaps something like:

We thank anonymous peer reviewers of a previous manuscript for calling our attention to these methodological issues and motivating this work.

If you've received "many comments" of this type, I doubt it's actually never been discussed in the literature, so I would really try to find any evidence of that to also frame your work. Of course, there may be no papers about the topic, but I'd expect to find mentions in methodology or discussions sections, mentioning it as a potential problem in interpreting some results, or someone's effort to demonstrate its not impactful for a given case.