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      Do Experts Listen to Other Experts? Field Experimental Evidence from Scientific Peer Review
      14 May 2019Working Paper Summaries

      Do Experts Listen to Other Experts? Field Experimental Evidence from Scientific Peer Review

      by Misha Teplitskiy, Hardeep Ranu, Gary Gray, Michael Menietti, Eva Guinan, and Karim R. Lakhani
      Influence is a fundamental aspect of collective decisions. It is thus crucial to consider not only the composition of evaluation panels but also their deliberation process. This study illuminates drivers of influence among an elite population of experts and contributes to our understanding of resource allocation in science and other expert domains.
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      Author Abstract

      Organizations in science and elsewhere often rely on committees of experts to make important decisions, such as evaluating early-stage projects and ideas. However, very little is known about how experts influence each other’s opinions and how that influence affects final evaluations. Here, we use a field experiment in scientific peer review to examine experts’ susceptibility to the opinions of others. We recruited 277 faculty members at seven U.S. medical schools to evaluate 47 early stage research proposals in biomedicine. In our experiment, evaluators (1) completed independent reviews of research ideas, (2) received (artificial) scores attributed to anonymous “other reviewers” from the same or a different discipline, and (3) decided whether to update their initial scores. Evaluators did not meet in person and were not otherwise aware of each other. We find that, even in a completely anonymous setting and controlling for a range of career factors, women updated their scores 13% more often than men, while very highly cited “superstar” reviewers updated 24% less often than others. Women in male-dominated subfields were particularly likely to update, updating 8% more for every 10% decrease in subfield representation. Very low scores were particularly “sticky” and seldom updated upward, suggesting a possible source of conservatism in evaluation. These systematic differences in how world-class experts respond to external opinions can lead to substantial gender and status disparities in whose opinion ultimately matters in collective expert judgment.

      Paper Information

      • Full Working Paper Text
      • Working Paper Publication Date: April 2019
      • HBS Working Paper Number: HBS Working Paper #19-107
      • Faculty Unit(s): Technology and Operations Management
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      Karim R. Lakhani
      Karim R. Lakhani
      Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration
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