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

Daniel Feenberg1; Ina Ganguli2; Patrick Gaulé3; Jonathan Gruber1,4,5

1 National Bureau of Economic Research · 2 University of Massachusetts Amherst · 3 Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education – Economics Institute · 4 Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology · 5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2017 open access

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.

DOI
10.1162/rest_a_00607
Volume
99 (1)
Pages
32-39
Language
en
Export
BibTeX
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