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arXiv · 2610.04688

Submission quotas as self-screening when manuscript production is cheap

Steve Lawford
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Abstract

When manuscripts become cheap to produce but expert evaluation stays scarce, submission rights acquire value. A non-transferable author quota turns submission into a revealed-priority decision: authors nominate their top projects using only ordinal information, and, with informative rankings, adding candidates cannot worsen the selected portfolio. The cost is inflexibility in allocating review capacity across authors and realised projects. In a tractable benchmark, I derive the exact equal-load condition under which the quota's robustness to heterogeneous fee sensitivity and cardinal miscalibration outweighs that cost. With bounded project values, abundance can turn an equal-load fee into an access screen, while the quota preserves within-author curation.

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Steve Lawford. 2026-10-03. Submission quotas as self-screening when manuscript production is cheap. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04688

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