Death of the salesman but not the sales force: how interested promotion skews scientific valuation
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706800.pdf
Description
Published version
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2.61 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Azoulay, Pierre
Wahlen, Jesse Michael
Zuckerman Sivan, Ezra W.
Date Issued
November 2019
Journal
American Journal of Sociology
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Citation
Azoulay, Pierre, J. Michael Wahlen, and Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan. “Death of the salesman but not the sales force: how interested promotion skews scientific valuation.” American Journal of Sociology 125 (2019): 786-845 © 2019 The Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Whereas research has demonstrated how social cues appearing as disinterested social validation can skew valuation processes, interested promotion may be at least as important. This factor is examined here via the premature death of 720 elite life scientists. Especially when scientists are young and their articles have received little attention, their deaths stimulate a long-lasting, positive increase in citation rates, relative to trajectories for equivalent articles authored by counterfactual (i.e., still-living) scientists. These patterns seem largely explained by a spike in posthumous recognition efforts by the deceased scientists’ associates. The upshot is clear evidence of informational inefficiency, which derives from the challenges of absorbing the massive volume of research produced by the scientific community and from its ambivalence about the norm of disinterestedness.
MIT Department
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/10.1086/706800
