I Would Have Bought That Groupon, But My Last Name Stopped Me!

From Kurt Carlson of Georgetown University and Jacqueline Conard of Belmont University comes an interesting study that shows a link between how consumers buy and their last name. It's called the last name effect and has to do with the way that alphabetization in elementary school has an effect on you for the rest of your life (other than making you think grilled cheese sandwiches have to come with tomato soup).  "The Last Name Effect", published in the Journal for Consumer Research, says that people whose last names are later in the alphabet tend to buy more quickly than those whose names are at the beginning.    

Carlson and Conrad carried out four experiments to test their hypothesis and found a person named Anderson would wait 25 percent more time than a person named Zimmer to buy a hot-ticket item.

In one experiment, Carlson and Conrad randomly emailed participants from social networking sites and told them they had the chance to win four tickets to a championship basketball game. Participants were asked to reply via email. The researchers found that people with last names starting with R-Z responded five minutes faster than those starting with A-I.    

The researchers hypothesize that "Those with names late in the alphabet apparently become frustrated and traumatized with always waiting till last and choosing whatever is left over. As adults, free from the tyrannical alphabet system, they overcompensate, jumping at a chance to go early."   

Reports about the study cited previous research showing a similar effect in academia: "Previous research into how names impact academic success found that economists, all else being equal, with last names falling earlier in the alphabet were more likely to gain tenure at a top university. The reasoning for this is economists often publish articles together and authors with surnames falling at the beginning of the alphabet come first in the citation." It's tough to get recognition when a citation lumps you in the "et. al." section.   

Both researchers indicated that they were surprised at the strength of the last name effect in the data they collected. They also found that the effect was tied to a woman's maiden name and not her married name. Life really is all about elementary school.