The Top-Ten Effect: Consumers’ Subjective Perceptions of Rankings

Lists of ranked items (e.g., Business Week’s top 25 MBA programs, Car and Driver’s top 10 cars) are ubiquitous in Western culture. From a consumption standpoint, there is considerable evidence that individuals find these lists informative and influential. Therefore, it is important to know exactly how the information provided in ranked lists is interpreted by users. Because a ranking is an ordinal scale of measurement, there is no technical reason why an information user should interpret items at adjoining ranks as having equal differences in the ranked attribute. Yet, in the absence of specific information about the ranked items, this equidistance seems reasonable for the information user to assume. In fact, even academic researchers have utilized linear functions that imply equidistance when modeling the effects of changes in an organization’s rank on the outcomes and policies of the ranked organizations (Monks and Ehrenberg 1999a, b) In this research, we propose the existence of a cognitive bias that overrides the presumption of equidistance between adjacent ranks in the interpretation of ranked lists. This bias, which has important implications for consumer evaluations of items presented in a ranked list, emerges due to our tendency to see complex and uncategorized arrays, such as long lists of numbers, in terms of a smaller set of categories. A consequence of this tendency to categorize is an exaggeration of the perceived differences between items at adjoining ranks that cross category boundaries.