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Daniel Feenberg
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
The Review of Economics and Statistics (2017) 99 (1): 32–39.
Published: 01 March 2017
Abstract
View articletitled, It’s Good to Be First: Order Bias in Reading and Citing NBER Working Papers
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for article titled, It’s Good to Be First: Order Bias in Reading and Citing NBER Working Papers
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.