Title: | What's in a (Missing) Name? Status and Signaling in Open Standards Development |
Authors: | Waguespack, Dave - University of Maryland Simcoe, Tim - University of Toronto Fleming, Lee - Harvard Business School |
Issue Date: | 2008 |
Series/Report no.: | Net Institute Working Paper;08-31 |
Abstract: | How much are we influenced by an author's identity? If identity matters, is it because we have a 'taste for status' or because it offers a useful shortcut — a signal that is correlated with the likely importance of their ideas? This paper presents evidence from a natural experiment that took place at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) — a community of engineers and computer scientists who develop the protocols used to run the Internet. The results suggest that IETF participants use authors' identity as a signal or filter, paying more attention to proposals from highstatus authors, and this has a surprisingly large impact on publication outcomes. There is little evidence of a 'taste' for status. |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29463 |
Appears in Collections: | NET Institute Working Papers Series |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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Simcoe_Waguespack_Fleming_08-31.pdf | 749.47 kB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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