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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.

We study the trend and the author name-ordering rule in finance publication using the publication records of 21 core finance journals during the period from 1990 to 2004. We empirically model the underlying factors that affect the alphabetical ordering rule among multi-authored finance articles. We find that the choice of alphabetical ordering is based on the quality of the article, institutional heterogeneity, team size and cultural factors. The central argument rests upon the need to signal and the importance of signalling within the context of bargaining behaviour among coauthors. The probability of choosing alphabetical name ordering rule is associated with high article quality, higher ranked institutions, smaller research team and the presence of European authors.

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