Online supplement for “ On submission fees and response times in academic publishing ”

In this online section, we consider an information structure in which both article quality and author signals are continuously distributed. The structure is identical to the one presented in Leslie (2005). This section, therefore, illustrates how the main result in the paper—that journal quality is maximized through a combination of both fees and delays when authors have heterogeneous cost preferences—carries over to the more general information structure. There is a continuum of authors of total mass 1. Each author has one article of ex ante unknown quality. An article’s quality is denoted z, where z ∼ N(z̄, σ z). Before deciding whether to submit their article, authors observe a private signal (i.e., form their own opinion) about their article’s quality. Denote this signal by q = z + v, where v ∼ N(0, σ v). Therefore, q ∼ N(μ, σ z + σ v). Denote by Fq(·) and fq(·) the density and distribution of q. Denote by Fz(·|q) and fz(·|q) the conditional density and distribution of z given q. One may explicitly calculate Fz(·|q); for our purposes, however, it is sufficient to recognize that Fz(·|q) is a normal distribution and that 1−Fz(z|q) < 1−Fz(z|q̂) for all z when q̂ > q. The journal editor maximizes the average quality of accepted articles while maintaining both an acceptable refereeing burden, τ , and a target publication size, n. To satisfy these constraints, the editor can impose submission fee M ≥ 0 and time delay T ≥ 0 on authors who submit their articles, and choose the minimum-quality cutoff for accepted articles zmin. After the editor chooses M , T and zmin, authors decide whether to submit their article. The editor perfectly observes the true quality z of submitted articles, and publishes any article with z ≥ zmin. An author who’s article is published, receives benefit V . As in the main body of the paper, there are four categories of authors, which differ in their disutility from fees and delays. Denote these categories by t ∈ {MT,M, T, ∅}, where group-MT authors face costs CMT = M + T , group-M authors face costs CM = M , and group-T authors face costs CT = T when they submit their article for review. A type ∅ author faces no submission costs. An author is type-t with probability ρt. To focus on the case where the acceptable refereeing burden is greater than the minimum number of submissions, we assume τ > ρ∅. 1