The authors assess the impact of two groups of economists; mainline economists who regard economics primarily as the science of exchange and mainstream economists who perceive economics primarily as the science of choice. To control for scholarly quality they investigated the citation impact of Nobel Prize winning economists, who were broken up into the two groups according to their approaches to market failure arguments. The authors found that over the period from 1970 to 2007 mainline economists had more of an impact than mainstream economists did.