Governance Outruns Analysis: Incidence and Manipulability of Credential-Gated Reciprocal Review

Generative tools have lowered the cost of producing a submission without lowering the cost of evaluating one, and venues have responded with governance: submission caps, reviewing obligations tied to submission count, and eligibility gates keyed to prior publication. These rules bind tens of thousands of researchers and are typically announced without published analysis of their incentive properties. We formalise the family as credential-gated reciprocal review and prove three structural results: a step-shaped obligation against linear demand yields incidence that is not monotone in consumption; a transferable credential gate defeats padding-resistant quota design, since the gate confers feasibility and no per-author price offsets a jump in the feasible set; and a per-author obligation with a per-paper penalty makes sanction risk perfectly correlated within an author's portfolio. Evaluating against a full prior-cycle submission graph (19,814 submissions, 64,648 authors, 75,859 observed reviews), the obligation covers 84.2% of realised demand, 81.4% of authors owe nothing, and the most burdened agents owe 4.45 times the review labour they generate against 0.45 times for the least. A three-part modification, evaluated on the same fixed graph, flattens incidence to near-uniform and removes the padding incentive.