Sharing names and information: Incidental similarities between CEOs and analysts can lead to favoritism in information disclosure

When two people coincidentally have something in common (such as a name or birthday), they tend to like each other more and are thus more likely to offer help and comply with requests. This dynamic can have important legal and ethical consequences whenever these incidental similarities give rise to unfair favoritism. Using a large-scale, longitudinal natural experiment, covering nearly 200,000 annual earnings forecasts over more than 25 y, we show that when a CEO and a securities analyst share a first name, the analyst's financial forecast is more accurate. We offer evidence that name matching improves forecast accuracy due to CEOs privately sharing pertinent information with name-matched analysts. Additionally, we show that this effect is especially pronounced among CEO-analyst pairs who share an uncommon first name. Our research thus demonstrates how incidental similarities can give way to special treatment. Whereas most investigations of the effects of similarity consider only one-shot interactions, we use a longitudinal dataset to show that the effect of name matching diminishes over time with more interactions between CEOs and analysts. We also point to the findings of an experiment suggesting that favoritism born of sharing a name may evade straightforward regulation in part due to people's perception that name similarity would exert little influence on them. Taken together, our work offers insight into when private disclosures are likely to be made. Our results suggest that the effectiveness of regulatory policies can be significantly impacted by psychological factors shaping the context in which they are implemented.

Driving in a man's world: examining gender disparity in the trucking industry

Purpose

Recent supply chain disruptions have highlighted the global shortage of truck drivers. Because it is a quintessential “masculine” profession, the proportion of women truck drivers is small, although efforts are underway to recruit and retain women. This research offers a comprehensive and theoretically-driven empirical analysis of women in the US trucking industry.

Design/methodology/approach

The research utilizes a detailed longitudinal database of 20 million driver inspections from 2010 to 2019. It is paired with US Social Security Administration data to infer the gender of the driver for each inspection. Descriptive evidence is provided, and a logit model is used to test the hypotheses.

Findings

The research finds that female truck drivers make up 3.2% of the inspection sample, but their representation has grown by 23.1% over the last decade. Women are vastly overrepresented in the jobs that are the easiest to get and underrepresented in jobs that offer better pay, more regular hours and more time at home. However, the proportion of women in more desirable truck driving jobs has grown from 2010 to 2019, offering positive news for the industry.

Practical implications

The research offers a more credible and realistic statistic for the proportion of women in the industry, contradicting previous industry figures. The research also highlights policy implications for industry stakeholders.

Social implications

The truck driving industry is vital for a nation's economic sustainability. Truck driving jobs offer better wages and more opportunity than many non-professional female-dominant jobs. The research emphasizes the path to move into jobs that are better suited for women with domestic or family responsibilities.

Originality/value

The authors document hitherto unknown facts about women in the US trucking industry. Using theoretically driven research in organizational science, this study highlights the interplay of supply-side and demand-side factors that help to explain a nuanced perspective of the workforce composition and discusses potential policies to increase the number of female drivers.

Fitting the name or unworthy of the name?—Does the name of family firm major shareholder influence family’s egoistic behavior?

It has been generally believed that the major shareholders of family firms are more willing to implement egoistic behaviors aimed at benefiting the family. This study analyses whether the major shareholder of the family firm whose name contains “Confucian symbols” such as benevolence, righteousness, loyalty, and kindness will reduce family self-interested behaviors as his name indicates. Using a sample consisting of all 425 family firms listed on Small and Medium Enterprise Board and Growth Enterprise Board, the result shows that the major shareholder whose name contains Confucian symbols is less likely to misappropriate corporate assets and less likely to make “family-first” personnel arrangements, meanwhile is more open to external supervision. Further mechanism testing reveals that the major shareholder whose name contains Confucian symbols also tends to choose corporate culture that reflects Confucianism. The study confirms that the name of the major shareholder is one of the factors which can affect the operation of the family business, demonstrates that different family firms have different attitudes towards family self-interest, and promotes the extant research from the “differences between family and non-family firms” level further to the “differences among family firms running by different families” level.

Ahead of others in the authorship order: names with middle initials appear earlier in author lists of academic articles in psychology

Middle name initials are often used by people in contexts where intellectual performance matters. Given this association, middle initials in people's names indicate intellectual capacity and performance (Van Tilburg and Igou, 2014). In the current research, we examined whether middle initials are associated with a typical academic indicator of intellectual performance: authorship order of journal articles. In psychology, authorship early in the author list of an article should correspond with greater contribution to this intellectual endeavor compared to authorship appearing later in the author list. Given that middle initials indicate intellectual capacity and performance, we investigated whether there would be a positive relationship between middle initials in author names and early (vs. late) appearance of names in author lists of academic journal articles in psychology. In two studies, we examined the relationship between amount of authors' middle initials and authorship order. Study 1 used a sample of 678 articles from social psychology journals published in the years 2006 and 2007. Study 2 used a sample of 696 articles from journals of multiple sub-disciplines in psychology published in the years from 1970 to 2013. Middle initials in author names were overrepresented early (vs. late) in author lists. We discuss implications of our findings for academic decisions on authorship orders, potential avenues of further investigation, and applications.

The name-letter-effect in groups: sharing initials with group members increases the quality of group work

Although the name-letter-effect has been demonstrated reliably in choice contexts, recent research has called into question the existence of the name-letter-effect–the tendency among people to make choices that bear remarkable similarity with the letters in their own name. In this paper, we propose a connection between the name-letter-effect and interpersonal, group-level behavior that has not been previously captured in the literature. Specifically, we suggest that sharing initials with other group members promotes positive feelings toward those group members that in turn affect group outcomes. Using both field and laboratory studies, we found that sharing initials with group members cause groups to perform better by demonstrating greater performance, collective efficacy, adaptive conflict, and accuracy (on a hidden-profile task). Although many studies have investigated the effects of member similarity on various outcomes, our research demonstrates how minimal a degree of similarity among members is sufficient to influence quality of group outcomes.