Alphabet Economics: The link between names and reputation
In lecture today, Bob mentioned that those with last names that start towards the end of the alphabet have and continue to be put at a disadvantage in various circumstances, a big one being when coauthoring papers.
I originally set out to look for an article I read I think about a year ago studying this general phenomenon and examining differing character traits among people whose last names start at the beginning of the alphabet and those that start towards the end. I didn’t end up finding that specific article but I did come across this one which specifically studies the link between names and reputation when coauthoring academic publications. The read is a bit dense but it highlights some interesting points that have real world implications such as tenure and salary and examines other aspects of the name such as last names with prefixes (eg. Van der, Von, De La, etc), two last names, and non-English names. Below is their conclusion:
Authorship on the overwhelming majority of economic coauthored papers is ordered lexicographically, on the basis of the alphabetical ordering of author’s names (Engers et al., 1999). Some people argue that this is beneficial for authors whose names come early in the alphabet, since being the first author implies certain advantages such as greater attention and prestige. Some others cite that having a name that comes early in the alphabet is actually harmful because an A-author can never signal a higher than proportional contribution to a paper. The first objective of this paper was to investigate whether the alphabetical ranking of names affects someone’s reputation. It was found that being a professor of economics and having a last name initial “A” instead of “Z” increases the probability of getting employment at high standing research institutions in the United States. This effect seems to hold when considering economic departments in the United Kingdom and when controlling for nationality and name origin. Furthermore, it was found that having a name ranked earlier in the alphabet increases the probability of being amongst the authors whose work has been downloaded or read the most. One could speculate that the reported relationship is driven by the effect of last name initials on life outcomes and has nothing to do with the convention in economics to order coauthors alphabetically. However, this potential explanation is ruled out since controlling for output and productivity yields very similar results. The second objective was to explore whether the established alphabetical effect creates differential incentives for coauthoring. It turned out that authors are aware of it and in some cases respond by manipulating their names. More precisely, it was found that authors whose name has a prefix beginning with “D” tend to use it for the determination of alphabetic name orderings whereas authors whose name has a prefix beginning with “V” tend to omit it when the alphabetical placement is defined. Furthermore, it was found that authors with two last names decide how to record these names based on lexicographical criteria: the higher the distance in the alphabet between the two names the higher the likelihood of using as a first name the one closest to “A”. Finally, we presented some evidence that the alphabetical effect influences Greek authors’ transliterating decisions, though to a much lesser extent than the two author groups previously mentioned—probably due to some common trends among Greek users.