How Many Submissions May an Author Make? A Harmonic Quota for Submissions under Coauthorship

2026-06-08

AI Summary

Current research evaluation systems often employ a uniform quota mechanism for author submissions, disregarding how co-authorship distributes the reviewing burden and thereby risking unfairness or strategic manipulation. This work proposes a dynamic quota rule based on the reciprocal of harmonic numbers, allocating submission costs proportionally to the number of co-authors. It further introduces a generalized harmonic quota framework characterized by only three interpretable parameters, unifying various allocation strategies within a single formalism. By incorporating the harmonic series—novel in the context of submission quota design—this mechanism achieves a favorable trade-off between fairness and strategyproofness. The approach is broadly applicable to scenarios involving scarce resource allocation, such as conference submissions, journal peer review, computational resources, and telescope time.

Abstract

Research evaluation systems -- including journals, conferences, and funders -- are increasingly using author-level submission limits to manage growing submission loads. Most existing policies charge each submission as a unit cost against every coauthor's quota. This treats a solo-authored submission and a large collaborative submission identically for each author, even though the reviewing demand of a collaborative submission is jointly attributable to many authors rather than one. Thus we ask the question: how many submissions may an author make under coauthorships? We propose a "Harmonic Quota Rule", in which an author's cost for a submission decreases with the number of coauthors as the reciprocal of their harmonic number. We derive this rule in a principled manner that navigates the tension between respecting collaborations and being resistant to manipulation by adding spurious authors. We also develop a Generalized Harmonic Quota Rule, a framework that subsumes the Harmonic Quota Rule and other natural quota rules. Our framework requires specification of only three interpretable parameters, thereby enabling organizers to choose among various seemingly disparate rules. Our work may also be useful in other scarce-resource allocation settings, such as allocation of compute and telescope time. An interactive tool is available at https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nihars/quota/organizer.html

Problem

• submission quota
• coauthorship
• research evaluation
• resource allocation
• harmonic quota

Innovation

• Harmonic Quota Rule
• coauthorship
• submission limits
• resource allocation
• manipulation resistance