A Queen's Whims

The source:“What’s in a Surname? The Effects of Surname Initials on Academic Success” by Liran Einav and Leeat Yariv, in ___Journal of Economic Perspectives___, Winter 2006.

Economics is the queen of the social sciences, and it owes much of its success to its hypothetical _homo economicus_, a tireless soldier who has colonized other disciplines by seeming to point the way toward understanding the rational basis of human behavior. However, there has been an outbreak of irrationality in the queen’s own court: alphabetical discrimination.

According to Liran Einav and Leeat Yariv, economists at Stanford and the California Institute of Technology, respectively, the awful truth is that professors at the nation’s top university economics departments are more likely to have tenure if their last names begin with a t the only privilege affected by alphabeticism. The advantage climbs to nearly a full one percent per s a rational explanation for all this, and it appears to reside in an oddly irrational tradition among academic economists: When they publish multiauthor articles, the authors are listed in alphabetical order.  Not only do those closest to A get the benefit of top billing, they enjoy a monopoly of attention in all subsequent citations of the article, which give only the first author’s name followed by “et al.”

Because there’s been a steep increase in multiauthor economics articles in recent years, Einav and Yariv guessed that alphabetical discrimination wasn’t common in the past, and that’s exactly what they found: no alphabeticism as recently as 1990. What about other fields in which authors are not listed in alphabetical order? In one field they checked, psychology, there was no discrimination.

Curiously, alphabeticism also disappears outside the top economics departments. That may be because lower-ranked departments put more emphasis “on vitae and publication counts, while top departments care more about visibility and impact.”

There are some obvious fixes for this little bit of irrationality—banning “et al.,” for example—but Yariv may not wait for the invisible hand to work its magic. She’s thinking of dropping the Y from her last name.