How Stable Are Top Choices Over Time? An Investigation Into Preferences Among Popular Baby Names In The United States.

For the problem of assessing initial agreement between two rankings of long lists, inference in the Fligner and Verducci (1988) multistage model for rankings is modified to provide a locally smooth estimator of stage-wise agreement. An extension to the case of overlapping but different sets of items in the two lists, and a stopping rule to identify the endpoint of agreement, are also provided. Simulations show that this approach performs very well under several conditions. The methodology is applied to a database of popular names for newborns in the United States and provides insights into trends as well as differences in naming conventions between the two sexes.