I was wondering about this general feature of Stack Exchange sites: when you answer a question, your reputation and number of badges are shown right next to your user name and profile picture.
What I am worried about is that when comparing several answers, a user may be biased towards those coming from high-rep users. In other words, when someone who asked a question is confronted with two equally good answers coming from a low-rep user and an high-rep user, he/she could give more weight to the answer of the latter just because, well, he/she has an higher rep.
If true, this could lead to a "rich-gets-richer" positive feedback in which high-rep users get more rep than the others, and because of this they get even more rep, etc.
Has this issue been taken into consideration during the development of Stack Exchange?