It's Good to Be First: Order Bias in Reading and Citing NBER Working Papers
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It's good to be first.pdf
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Author(s)
Feenberg, Daniel
Ganguli, Ina
Gruber, Jonathan
Gaule, Patrick
Date Issued
February 2017
Journal
Review of Economics and Statistics
Publisher
MIT Press
Citation
Feenberg, Daniel; Ganguli, Ina; Gaulé, Patrick and Gruber, Jonathan. “It’s Good to Be First: Order Bias in Reading and Citing NBER Working Papers.” Review of Economics and Statistics 99, no. 1 (March 2017): 32–39 © 2017 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
Sloan School of Management
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00607
