Good to Go First? Position Effects in Expert Evaluation of Early-Stage Ventures

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Bian, Jiang; Greenberg, Jason; Li, Jizhen; Wang, Yanbo
• 署名单位: University of Hong Kong; University of Pennsylvania; Tsinghua University
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2021.4132
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 300-315
• 关键词: Entrepreneurship; Evaluation; BIAS; sociology; research and development; INNOVATION; CHINA; venture capital

摘要

There is often considerable anxiety and conflicting advice concerning the benefits of presenting/being evaluated first. We thus investigate how expert evaluators vary in their evaluations of entrepreneurial proposals based upon the order in which they are evaluated. Our research setting is a premiere innovation fund competition in Beijing, China, where the prize money at stake is economically meaningful, and evaluators are quasirandomly assigned to evaluate written grant proposals without the possibility of peer influence. This enables us to credibly recover a causal position effect. We also theorize and test how heterogeneity in evaluators' prior (context-specific) judging experience moderates position effects. Overall, we find that a proposal evaluated first requires total assets in the top 10th percentile to merely equal the evaluation of a proposal in the bottom 10th percentile that is not evaluated first. Firm and evaluator fixed-effects models yield consistent findings. We consider evaluation design elements that may mollify these position effects in the discussion section.