On the influence of rankings

Pré-publication, Document de travail: Ranking systems are becoming increasingly important in many areas, in the Web environment and academic life for instance. In a world with a tremendous amount of choices, rankings play the crucial role of influencing which objects are 'tasted' or selected. This selection generates a feedback when the ranking is based on citations, as is the case for the widely used invariant method. The selection affects new stated opinions (citations), which will, in turn, affect next ranking. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this feedback in the context of journals by studying some simple but reasonable dynamics. Our main interest is on the long run behavior of the process and how it depends on the preferences, in particular on their diversity. We show that multiple long run behavior may arise due to strong self enforcing mechanisms at work with the invariant method. These effects are not present in a simple search model in which individuals are influenced by the cites of the papers they first read.

Auteur(s)

Gabrielle Demange

Date de publication
  • 2011
Mots-clés JEL
D71 D83
Mots-clés
  • Ranking
  • Scoring
  • Invariant method
  • Search
Référence interne
  • PSE Working Papers n°2011-19
Version
  • 1