"Judging the paper by its cover: affiliation bias in conference admissions" by Luca Favero

Topic

Connections predict career success across many occupations. In academia, conference participation is essential to build and maintain a professional network, thus contributing to academic success. In this paper, we experimentally test whether and how academic affiliation affects conference acceptance. We run a stratified matched-pair field experiment leveraging the reviewing phase of an early career workshop in economics. By randomly allocating anonymous papers with and without the submitting author's affiliation to matched pairs of reviewers, we find that affiliation disclosure leads to a substantial bias in favor of papers from authors coming from prestigious institutions. Importantly, we find that this bias is largely explained by in-group favoritism, as it is mainly driven by reviewers from similarly ranked institutions. This suggests that affiliation bias can reinforce existing inequalities and hamper academic diversity.