Investigating Status Effects in University Technology Commercialization

Abstract

Research on the evaluation of science and technology shows that when the value of new technology is uncertain, evaluators are influenced by the status of the actors associated with the new work. However, existing studies drawing on observational approaches face various obstacles in attempting to isolate status effects while controlling for quality. To assess the true causal effect of status, this study builds on two randomized experiments to investigate how status affects evaluators’ assessments of the value of new technology in the context of university technology licensing. In these experiments, technology licensing officers at US research universities were invited to evaluate new inventions in which everything except the inventor’s status was held constant. The results suggest that technology licensing officers perceive the inventions of high status inventors to have more commercial potential. In addition to demonstrating the causal effect of status on the evaluation of new technology, these findings s...