What’s in a (Missing) Name? Status and Signaling in Open Standards Development

Simcoe Tim, J.L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Waguespack Dave, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, and Lee Fleming, Harvard Business School

4/10/2009
(Original Publish Date: 10/1/2008)

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 high- status authors, and this has a surprisingly large impact on publication outcomes. There is little evidence of a "taste" for status.