Why research reputation trumps teaching reputation in universities

By Sean Leaver

economics reputation lekking behaviour universities research

In humans we see lekking behaviour in the general rule that people like being around successful people. This is why social A-lists exist. More generally as animal behaviour, a lek is a gathering of individuals for the purposes of competitive display - competitive signalling. For universities, A-list researchers attract other high quality researchers and also crucially high quality teachers. Why is this important for attracting high quality teachers? Academics themselves are generally seen to be sensitive to reputational influences of their peer group. High quality teachers will be hesitant to join to a university who's reputation is ambiguous (uncertainty as to rank). The solution is to have an unambiguous reputational signal. However, the signal needs to overcome the problems of asymmetric information associated with the observation ('measurement') of quality. It is for this reason that research reputation trumps teaching reputation. Research reputation is a less ambiguous signal as a result of the strength of external validation - active peer review in both academic and public domains (media). Teaching reputation is harder to validate outside the university in which it occurs, leading to the problem of asymmetric information.

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