It is well known that rankings play a central role in economics. Economists use rankings as evaluative devices to assess people, papers, and journals in a range of situations from informal everyday judgements to the consequential assessments involved in academic hiring. In this chapter, we attempt to move from an observation of the ubiquity of rankings in economics to a theoretical reflection on possible explanations. We chart the recent historical development of the field-specific preoccupation we call the ranking syndrome and provide examples from several recent empirical studies of Scandinavian Economics. Our conceptual discussion draws on the literature to assess different tentative models of explanation, including the general heterogeneity and contingency of social processes of valuation from valuation studies, the notion of reactivity of rankings from the organizational evaluation literature, the concepts of classification situations and ordinalization as a mode of social classification, and the performativity of economics from the sociology of knowledge. Overall, the chapter charts theoretical approaches available to explain the ubiquity of rankings in economics while identifying approaches for further empirical research and strategies for addressing the ranking syndrome.