Certified Random: A New Order for Coauthorship

Abstract

Our last names above appear in alphabetical order, but a coin was tossed to determine name placement. The symbol ® between our names is a signal that the names are in random order. Certified random order, randomization that is institutionally marked by a commonly understood symbol such as ®, is the topic of this paper.Alphabetical order is the norm for name order in joint research in economics. Table 1 reports the prevalence of this norm. Around 85 percent of two-author economics papers are written with the authors listed in alphabetical order.1 That percentage falls with more authors, possibly capturing the fear of et al. oblivion, or there could be research assistants involved.2 Compare this to the physical sciences, in which first authorship is given, presumably not without occasional disagreement, to the lead contributor, while other not-so-subtle signals such as lab leadership are sent through ancillary ordering conventions. Possibly the civility of the alphabetical 1 Certainly, alphabetical order is occasionally overturned (see Table 1 again) and when it is, it is a clear signal that the author who now appears first has done the bulk of the work. This option is central to the theory we develop.

Maximality in the Farsighted Stable Set

“…Ray acknowledges funding from the National Science Foundation under Grant SES‐1629370. The names on this paper were originally in certified random order, as proposed in Ray Robson (). Unfortunately, the Econometric Society does not endorse the use of the random order symbol, thereby forcing us to return to alphabetical order.…”

Credit Attribution and Collaborative Work

“…Second, the result offers an equilibrium theory of team formation when there are only two agents, e.g., two authors, which is common in scientific research. 28 And third, by the continuity 26 Formally, ∂ u i (16) and (17), we observe that 1 − c i (x i ) = u i > 0 in equilibrium. 28 For an arbitrary number of agents, one needs to consider all possible subteams.…”

Credit attribution and collaborative work

“…Authorship conventions range from alphabetical (mathematics, economics), to descending importance (biology, high energy physics), to listing the lead author first and the principal investigator last (chemistry, psychology); see Shen and Barabási (2014). Recently the American Economic Association (AEA) has started permitting random order of coauthors (Ray r Robson, 2018).…”