Author order and research quality.

JEL Classification: A10, J20, Z00

1. Introduction

The assignment of property rights is an integral aspect of any tree-market economic system. Indeed, it is well known that property rights matter and that better specified property rights lead to higher output and productivity. Curiously, the assignment of intellectual property rights in academic markets, as manifested by author orderings, exhibits a substantial amount of heterogeneity. We observe this heterogeneity both across and within various academic disciplines.

Consider first the comparison across disciplines. Nearly 90% of the papers published in major economics journals such as the Journal of Political Economy (JPE), American Economic Review (AER), and the Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE) use alphabetized listings (Engers et al. 1999). In contrast, only about 30% of the papers published in major biological journals such as Biological Bulletin, Quarterly Review of Biology, and the Journal of Experimental Biology employ alphabetized listings (Laband and Tollison 2000). These differences in author orderings are statistically significant, even when the comparison is restricted to works completed by two-author teams. A further examination of author attributions across academic disciplines confirms the extent of heterogeneity across disciplines. Table 1 (reproduced from Engers et al. 1999) reports findings pertaining to the rates of alphabetization across several academic disciplines. The disciplines examined include economics and seven additional academic disciplines. Interestingly, we observe that while those disciplines closest to economics (finance, economic history, and law) exhibit the same lexicographic convention, the physical sciences (chemistry and medicine) employ alphabetical listings at a rate that is closer to 50%. In addition, fields like sociology and psychology also employ alphabetical listings at a rate that is closer to 50%.

Consider next the comparison within a given discipline. With data that we collected for the period 1998-2000, Table 2 reports the rate of alphabetization for top tier and second tier economics journals. The top tier journals include JPE, AER, and QJE, while the second tier journals include Atlantic Economic Journal (AEJ), Economic Inquiry (EI), and Southern Economic Journal (SEJ). On the whole, there is a slight increase in the rate of alphabetization in the top tier journals from the earlier period of 1978-1997. More strikingly, we notice that the top tier journals have a markedly higher rate of alphabetization than the second tier journals (92.6% vs. 78.3%, z = 3.82, p < 0.01). This difference within the same discipline is indeed surprising. Similarly, in a recent paper, Laband and Tollison (2002) report that the rate of alphabetization varies dramatically between two closely related disciplines--economics and agricultural economics. Analyzing data for both the American Economic Review (AER) and American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AJAE), they find that the majority of AER articles are listed alphabetically. In contrast, alphabetical and nonalphabetical papers are almost evenly divided at the AJAE. Further, the rate of alphabetization at AER has shown an increasing trend over the period 1981-1996, whereas the rate of alphabetization at AJAE has remained relatively flat. They find these differences to be particularly surprising since the training and methodologies employed by both types of scholars--economists and agricultural economists--are very similar.

Before we investigate the mechanism underlying this heterogeneity, it is natural to ask: Do authors care about author ordering? Casual observation and anecdotal evidence suggests that they do. For example, in the medical field, Riesenberg and Lundberg (1990, p. 1857) report that "some landmark studies are known by the name of their first author, lending support to the impression that, by being listed first, he or she played a pivotal role in performing the work and writing the article." Riesenberg and Lundberg further write that obtaining "first-listed author versus, say, sixth on a major article can carry substantial weight in the attainment of those academic rewards to which investigators rightly aspire."

If authors do care about author orderings, then systematic departures from a 50% rate of alphabetization within two-author teams are a real puzzle. In other words, collaborators striving for priority will lead to a situation in which alphabetical listings and nonalphabetical listings coexist with equal frequency. Thus, we ask (i) What is the underlying mechanism that determines the allocation of intellectual property rights in academic markets? (ii) Can the observed heterogeneity in listing practices be explained by generally accepted differences across academic markets? (iii) Will research quality increase if journal owners mandate that author listings reflect relative contributions, and (iv) What is to be made, say, of an increasing trend in alphabetization at a given journal? Clearly, the answer to the former two questions is of great theoretical interest to scholars of economics. In addition, the answer to the latter two questions might help enhance the functioning of various organizations that are intimately associated with the knowledge production process (e.g., journal boards, professional societies, etc.).

Others have attempted to explain the mechanism underlying author listings. However, these explanations are not without limitations. Engers et al. (1999), for example, employ a game-theoretic framework and suggest that alphabetical listings in economics arise as a result of a signaling equilibrium between authors and the market. While this helps explain the high incidence of alphabetized listings in economics, it cannot explain the lack of alphabetization in related disciplines such as agricultural economics. It also fails to explain the lower levels of alphabetization found in other disciplines. In addition, Engers et al. derive the result that if coauthors are compelled to use a nonalphabetized or priority listing of contributions, the quality of research will go up. In effect, with nonequal property rights assignment, authors will supply more effort to have higher priority, resulting in higher quality research output. However, in a recent paper, Laband and Tollison (2002) find that the quality of published papers, as measured by the number of citations over a five-year period, actually increases with alphabetization. This finding thus "contradicts" the prescription emerging from the theoretical work of Engers et al. As such, it calls for a different mechanism to represent the assignment of intellectual property rights in academic markets.

Laband and Tollison (2000) provide a somewhat different explanation for the lexicographic norm prevalent in economics journals. They suggest that the field of economics is characterized by a relatively high degree of intellectual collaboration. As such, alphabetized listings serve as a form of pay compression and facilitate the collaborative process. Indeed, this is the argument made for pay compression in industrial settings (Lazear 1989). However, this argument also is subject to limitations. While it is easy to understand how pay compression can facilitate cooperation in an industrial setting where enterprise-wide cooperation may be beneficial, it is less clear how pay compression can facilitate cooperation in the production of academic research. In contrast to the zero-sum nature of industrial settings, the production of academic research has more of a positive-sum flavor. That is, in the presence of steep pay differences, a manager may obtain personal benefit if his (or her) second-rate project succeeds over the first-rate project of a competitive manager. In contrast, every author is better off by creating research, even with a second-author attribution, than not creating research at all. Thus, in these settings, the motivation for sabotage is much reduced.

Given these limitations, we extend the literature by developing an alternative view of the manner in which intellectual property rights are assigned in academic markets. Our conceptualization is stochastic in nature, and we focus on two-author teams. We believe that authors do indeed care about how intellectual property rights are assigned. As such, each individual within the team supplies a high level of effort to obtain priority in author listings. However, research is a creative process in that realized contributions are drawn randomly from a distribution (uniform). The rule for author assignments involves comparing the realized contributions, with a small tolerance level to incorporate bargaining costs. We then employ simulations to compute the rate of alphabetization as a function of the stringency with which papers are accepted for publication. We also examine differences in quality between alphabetical and nonalphabetical papers that have cleared the publication hurdle.

Our stochastic conceptualization is consistent with two empirical regularities associated with author orderings. We find that the rate of alphabetization increases in the publication hurdle. And, conditional on clearing the publication hurdle, quality increases with alphabetization. The ability of our stochastic model to predict these empirical regularities gives us confidence regarding its ability to capture the underlying mechanism behind the assignment process. As such, they support our view that the production of research is inherently a creative process. Moreover, it suggests that intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary differences can potentially be accounted for by differences in the publication hurdle.