Good to Go First? Position Effects in Expert Evaluation of Early-Stage Ventures

Jiang Bian (), Jason Greenberg (), Jizhen Li () and Yanbo Wang ()
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Jiang Bian: University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
Jason Greenberg: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
Jizhen Li: Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Yanbo Wang: University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong

Management Science, 2022, vol. 68, issue 1, 300-315

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: entrepreneurship; evaluation; bias; sociology; research and development: innovation; China; venture capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:68:y:2022:i:1:p:300-315

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