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Not only is it lonely at the top, but a paper by two business professors suggests that, at least for literary prize winners, the view can get a little ugly, too. The study, by Balazs Kovacs of the University of Lugano and Amanda Sharkey of the University of Chicago, compared online reader reviews for 32 pairs of books that either won or were nominated for a major literary prize. They found that winning a prestigious award not only garners more attention for a book, but also more negative reviews.

Julian Barnes’s novel “The Sense of an Ending,” for example, received warm praise from critics and went on to win the 2011 Booker Prize. After the prize was announced, however, the researchers wrote that “sales of the book soared, but something surprising happened as well: readers’ ratings of the book entered a period of protracted decline.” The study’s authors attribute the reaction to two main factors. First, readers attracted by awards tended to judge a book more harshly because of that validation. “Readers assume that a book is ‘good’ because it won an award, but what is ‘good’ is partly a matter of individual taste. And the reader’s taste may not match up with the taste of the critics and others on judging committees,” Ms. Sharkey told The Guardian.

The second element has to do with what the authors referred to as “snob effects.” For those who value exclusivity, the fact that a book becomes more popular in the wake of winning an award is enough to cast a negative light on the book. The paper is to be published in a coming issue of Administrative Science Quarterly.