Collaboration Incentives: Endogenous Selection into Single and Coauthorships by Surname Initial in Economics and Management

Abstract

Many prior studies suggest that alphabetical ordering confers undeserved professional advantages on authors with earlier surname initials. However, these studies assume that authors select into coauthorships without regard to the incentives identified. We consider the alternative and develop a model of endogenous selection into single and coauthorships for economics, which uses alphabetical ordering. We then test it with authorship data from economics, with management (which does not use alphabetical ordering) as a benchmark. We predict that lower “quality” authors with earlier surnames would be less desirable as coauthors, whereas higher quality authors with later surnames would have a lower desire to coauthor. Both types of authors are therefore more likely to single-author. Furthermore, higher quality authors with earlier surnames should have more and better coauthoring options. Consistent with our predictions, we find citation ranks increases on surnames for single-authored works and decreases by almost the same amount for coauthored in economics, both absolutely and compared to management. Also as predicted, this effect is driven by lower-tier journals in which there is likely a thinner market for coauthors. Furthermore, we show that the disadvantage to authors with later surname initials is not corrected for but rather worsened by nonalphabetical ordering, due to adverse selection for second-authors who accept nonalphabetical ordering. Our findings show that despite the innumerable considerations that go into the decision to coauthor, the arcane difference in the share of credit determined by surname initial do affect the choices of academic economists to collaborate.