Status, Quality, and Attention: What's in a (Missing) Name?

How much are we influenced by an author's identity when evaluating his or her work? This paper exploits a natural experiment to measure the impact of status signals in the context of open standards development. For a period of time, e-mails announcing new submissions to the Internet Engineering Task Force would replace individual author names with “et al.” if submission volumes were unusually high. We measure the impact of status signals by...