Retailers know that the items they place at eye level of store shelves will sell faster than those that are down low. The top headline on a news website will usually be clicked more often than the ones down lower. So maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that the same logic applies to economics research, with long-lasting implications for what ideas are propagated.

Economists, they’re just like us.

That was a conclusion of a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper earlier this year that studied downloads of other National Bureau of Economic Research working papers. The group, a Cambridge, Mass. nonprofit devoted to, well, economic research, sends out an email every Monday morning with summaries of its latest working papers to 23,000 subscribers.

No editorial judgment goes into the sequence in which the working papers appear. It is random, based on the order in which the paper was submitted and in which the N.B.E.R. approval process was completed. In other words, there is no inherent reason to think that the first paper listed is more groundbreaking, important or interesting than the third or 17th.

But a lot more people read the first one listed. Showing up first in the email generated a 33 percent increase in the number of people who clicked on the working paper and a 29 percent increase in the number who downloaded it.