It's Good to Be First: Order Bias in Reading and Citing NBER Working Papers

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Feenberg, Daniel; Ganguli, Ina; Gaule, Patrick; Gruber, Jonathan
• 署名单位: National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Massachusetts System; University of Massachusetts Amherst; Charles University Prague; Czech Academy of Sciences; Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• 刊物名称: REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0034-6535
• DOI: 10.1162/REST_a_00607
• 发表日期: 2017-03
• 页码: 32-39
• 关键词: impact; ORDER

摘要

When choices are made from ordered lists, individuals can exhibit biases toward selecting certain options as a result of the ordering. We examine this phenomenon in the context of consumer response to the ordering of economics papers in an e-mail announcement issued by the NBER. We show that despite the effectively random list placement, papers listed first each week are about 30% more likely to be viewed, downloaded, and subsequently cited. We suggest that a model of skimming behavior, where individuals focus on the first few papers in the list due to time constraints, would be most consistent with our findings.