Good to Go First? Position Effects in Expert Evaluation of Early-Stage Ventures
研究专家评估创业项目时，评估顺序如何影响评分，发现第一个被评估的项目需要资产排前10%才能与最后10%的非首个项目得分相当，对创业竞赛设计有参考价值。
There is often considerable anxiety and conflicting advice concerning the benefits of presenting/being evaluated first. We thus investigate how expert evaluators vary in their evaluations of entrepreneurial proposals based upon the order in which they are evaluated. Our research setting is a premiere innovation fund competition in Beijing, China, where the prize money at stake is economically meaningful, and evaluators are quasi-randomly assigned to evaluate written grant proposals without the possibility of peer influence. This enables us to credibly recover a causal position effect. We also theorize and test how heterogeneity in evaluators’ prior (context-specific) judging experience moderates position effects. Overall, we find that a proposal evaluated first requires total assets in the top 10th percentile to merely equal the evaluation of a proposal in the bottom 10th percentile that is not evaluated first. Firm and evaluator fixed-effects models yield consistent findings. We consider evaluation design elements that may mollify these position effects in the discussion section. This paper was accepted by Sridhar Tayur, entrepreneurship and innovation.