From submitting a paper to a journal until getting the first referee reports takes about six months in economics. It is very rare to get accepted on the first try. Most papers are rejected, and an immediate acceptance implies having submitted to too weak a journal. Waiting for the referee reports on the revision and second revision takes another six plus a few months. This seems unnecessary (reading a paper does not take six months) and inefficient (creates delay in disseminating research results), but is used for incentives.
Delay discourages frivolous submissions. It forces authors to evaluate their own work with some honesty. If the referee reports were immediate, then everyone would start at the top journal and work their way down through every venue of publication until getting accepted. This would create a large refereeing and editing burden. Delay is a cost for the authors, because simultaneous submissions to multiple journals are not allowed. Trying for high-ranking journals is a risk, because the author may not have anything to show at the next evaluation. This reduces submissions to top journals. It may be optimal to start at the middle of the ranking where the chances of acceptance are higher.
A similar incentive to submit to the correct quality level of journal can be created by imposing a submission fee, forbidding further submissions for a period of time if rejected or requiring the author to write referee reports on others’ papers. A submission fee should be distinguished from publication fees, which are used at fake journals. The submission fee is paid no matter whether the paper is accepted, therefore does not create the incentive for the journal to lower its standards and publish more papers.
The submission fee would impose different costs on authors in different financial circumstances. Some have research funds to pay the fee, some do not. Similarly, delay has a larger effect on people whose evaluation is coming sooner. Being banned from a journal for a given amount of time after a rejection is worse for a researcher working in a single field. Interdisciplinary folk have a wider variety of venues to publish in. Writing referee reports as a price of having one’s work evaluated may lead to sloppy reviewing. Any mechanism to induce self-selection has a cost. Yet self-selection is needed.