Marketing Journal Coauthorships: An Empirical Analysis of Coauthor Behavior

The objective of this article is to study the bargaining behavior of coauthors in multiauthored marketing papers. The literature argues that the order of author names sends a signal about their relative contribution to the article, and the signal is muted when the names are in alphabetical order. In addition, other things being the same, the literature also stipulates that alphabetization increases with article quality. The authors examine these hypotheses with publication data from a set of marketing journals during 1991-2000. The findings suggest that signaling is more important for less known authors, authors from less prestigious schools, for articles published in lower-rated journals, and when there are more coauthors.