Buy your apples from Abraham Aardvark

It is not just researchers and co-authors who benefit from having names close to the beginning of the alphabet:

The names of traders should not matter if information is symmetric across traders. By examining export data from Chinese customs, we find persistent lexicographic biases in firm-level export records. Firms whose names are lexicographically earlier in the Chinese-character rank export more to countries that have greater language proximities to Chinese, while firms whose names are lexicographically earlier in the English-romanization rank export more to countries that have greater language proximities to English. The lexicographic biases signify linguistic visibility as a source of comparative advantage in international trade.

Here is the full paper by Hua Cheng, Cui Hu, and Ben G. Li.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.