It’s Good to Be First: Order Bias in Reading and Citing NBER Working Papers
研究发现，在NBER每周邮件公告中，排在第一位的经济学论文被浏览、下载和引用的概率比随机位置高出约30%，这种顺序偏差源于读者因时间有限而只关注列表前几篇的“略读”行为。
When choices are made from ordered lists, individuals can exhibit biases toward selecting certain options as a result of the ordering. We examine this phenomenon in the context of consumer response to the ordering of economics papers in an e-mail announcement issued by the NBER. We show that despite the effectively random list placement, papers listed first each week are about 30% more likely to be viewed, downloaded, and subsequently cited. We suggest that a model of “skimming” behavior, where individuals focus on the first few papers in the list due to time constraints, would be most consistent with our findings.