Matthew: Effect or Fable?

By Pierre Azoulay, Toby E. Stuart, Yanbo Wang. Management Sciences, 2014

330 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In a market context, a status effect occurs when actors are accorded differential recognition for their efforts depending on their location in a status ordering, holding constant the quality of these efforts. In practice, because it is very difficult to measure quality, this ceteris paribus proviso often precludes convincing empirical assessments of the magnitude of status effects. We address this problem by examining the impact of a major status-conferring prize that shifts actors' positions in a prestige ordering. Specifically, using a precisely constructed matched sample, we estimate the effect of a scientist becoming a Howard Hughes Medical Institute HHMI Investigator on citations to articles the scientist published before the prize was awarded. We do find evidence of a postappointment citation boost, but the effect is small and limited to a short window of time. Consistent with theories of status, however, the effect of the prize is significantly larger when there is uncertainty about article quality, and when prize winners are of relatively low status at the time of election to the HHMI Investigator Program. This paper was accepted by David Hsu, entrepreneurship and innovation.

Subfields: Accounting, Safety Research, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2871ce68cf5feea6f9cdf48386592136dd67f19a

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Citations in the corpus

Prominent but Less Productive (2015, background): “Status is important to control for because it has been shown to influence how a scientist’s work is received (Azoulay, Stuart, and Wang, 2014).”
The Role of Connections in Academic Promotions (2014, unknown): “Potentially, it might be that due to the existence of a Matthew effect, promotion increases the number of citations received (Azoulay et al. 2014).”
Pursuing Quality: How Search Costs and Uncertainty Magnify Gender-based Double Standards in a Multistage Evaluation Process (2017, background): “…information often leads evaluators to rely on status characteristics as indicators of candidates’ expected performance or quality (e.g., Podolny, 1993, 2005; Simcoe and Waguespack, 2011; Azoulay, Stuart, and Wang, 2014; Kim and King, 2014), making evaluations more of an art than a science.”
Online Reputation Management: Estimating the Impact of Management Responses on Consumer Reviews (2015, background): “Differences in cross-platform traveler demographics and TripAdvisor-specific improvements.”
The Paradox of Publicity (2014, methodology): “In statistical modeling, we followed Azoulay, Stuart, and Wang (2014) and Singh and Agrawal (2011) and conducted pooled regressions that include matched-dyad fixed effects.”