Rewarding Numbers
Quantification Premia and Evaluative Convergence
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2424148 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Katariina Mueller-Gastell (0000-0001-5134-4880, Stanford University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Publication date | 2022-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2378-0231 • E-ISSN: 2378-0231 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/23780231221103052 |
| OpenAlex | W4285153643 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 49 |
The author advances the theory that when evaluation bears high stakes and is subject to high uncertainty of quality, a greater presence of numbers in the evaluated materials positively influences the evaluator's assessment of the quality of the evaluated object and leads to less variance in the overall assessment of quality by evaluators. The author explores these ideas in a case study of the MacArthur Foundation's 2016-2017 $100 million winner-take-all grant competition for nonprofit organizations and tests them using judges' numeric scores and comments together with information from the application materials, tax records, and previous funding histories of the applicant organizations. In this competition, organizations that included more numbers of any kind in their application materials received on average higher scores. Furthermore, the independent judges on the nondeliberative panel were more likely to give the applicants similar scores. Quantification thus both carries a premium-it predicts higher scores-and produces evaluative convergence
Actuarial science · Competition (biology · Convergence (economics · Economics · Foundation (evidence · Object (grammar · Political science · Quality (philosophy · Subject (documents · Variance (accounting · Accounting and Organizational Management · Auditing, Earnings Management, Governance · Computer Science · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies · Law · Psychology · Accounting · Artificial Intelligence
Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation
Creating a Class
How Professors Think
The Seductions of Quantification
Valuing the Unique
Incentives and creativity
Constitutive Effects of Performance Indicators
Fake It Till You Make It
Algorithm appreciation
The Rationalization of Charity
Unobservable Selection and Coefficient Stability
Nonprofit Organizations and Outcome Measurement
Nonprofits, Funders, and Evaluation
Variance Function Regressions for Studying Inequality
Gender Stereotypes, Same-Gender Preferences, and Organizational Variation in the Hiring of Women
Scaling Down Inequality
It's the Conventional Thought That Counts
The Mark of a Woman's Record
Commensuration as a Social Process
Go with Your Gut
Styles of Causal Thought
Cents and Sensibility
The Categorical Imperative
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |