Collaboration incentives: Endogenous selection into single and coauthorships by surname initial in economics and management

Many prior studies suggest that default alphabetical ordering of coauthors in economicsconfers disproportionate professional advantages on those with an early surname initialbecause of the greater prominence it gives to the first author. However, these studies do notconsider that authors select into coauthorships according to the incentives identified. Wedevelop a model of endogenous selection into single and coauthorships around the principlethat no one wants to be second author when they expect to provide the larger contribution(i.e., are of higher “quality”). We test it with authorship data from economics, with man-agement (which does not use default alphabetical ordering) as a benchmark. We predict foreconomics that lower quality authors with an early surname initial would be less desirablecoauthors, whereas higher quality authors with a late initial would have a lower desire tocoauthor. Most desired are early initial authors of high quality, who are therefore advan-taged in forming high-quality collaborations. The combined effect predicts citation rankincreases with surname initial for single-authored papers and decreases for coauthored.We find both effects for economics when compared to management and absolutely. Ourfindings indicate that part of the advantage enjoyed by early surname initial authors in eco-nomics could be due to the higher ability among them having more incentive-compatiblecollaborators, rather than merely to greater prominence