How to change the order in which articles are quoted inside \citet{article1,article2,…}?

Question

At some point in my Thesis I write something like what the following MWE generates.

\documentclass[a4paper]{scrartcl}
\usepackage[isbn=false,style=authoryear-comp,backend=biber,natbib,maxbibnames=99,maxcitenames=2,hyperref=true]{biblatex} % To get fancy bibliography as desired.
\usepackage{csquotes} % To make sure that my Bibliography loads correctly.

% REFERENCES SETTINGS

\usepackage[colorlinks=true,urlcolor=blue,linkcolor=black]{hyperref}

% BIBLIOGRAPHY SETTINGS

\addbibresource{Bib.bib}
\setlength\bibitemsep{2\itemsep}
\AtBeginBibliography{ 
\renewcommand*{\mkbibnamefamily}[1]{\textsc{#1}}
\renewcommand*{\mkbibnamegiven}[1]{\textsc{#1}}
\renewcommand*{\mkbibnameprefix}[1]{\textsc{#1}}
\renewcommand*{\mkbibnamesuffix}[1]{\textsc{#1}}
}
\DeclareNameAlias{author}{last-first}
\DeclareDelimFormat[cbx@textcite]{nameyeardelim}{\addspace}
\renewcommand*{\bibfont}{\small}

\begin{document}
Following \citet{hartmascolell,evans}, utilities... 
\printbibliography
\end{document}

Call the associated .bib file Bib.bib and save it in the same folder as the MWE for the MWE to run. The .bib file should exactly be:

@article{hartmascolell,
author = "S. Hart and A. Mas-Colell",
title = "Bargaining and Value",
journal = "Econometrica",
volume = "64",
pages = "357--380",
year = "1996",
url = "https://doi.org/10.2307/2171787"
}

@article{evans,
author = "R. Evans",
title = "Coalitional Bargaining with Competition to Make Offers",
journal = "Games and Economic Behavior",
volume = "19",
pages = "211--220",
year = "1997",
url = "https://doi.org/10.1006/game.1997.0553"
}

Then, we obtain the following output:

I suspect that Evans appears before Hart & Mas-Colell because the order is lexicographic. However, to me, it would make more sense to get first Hart & Mas-Colell and then Evans because of the time-order of the papers (one is from 1996 and the other one is from 1997).

Therefore, my question is: how can I change the order in which authors appear from lexicographic to temporal? And also: is there any reason for which the lexicographic order is better (aka, default)?

Note: unless there is a reason not do so, I want to keep the order of the entries in the bibliography UNALTERED.

Note 2: there are related questions out there, but none of them addresses this with \citet{...}.

Answer 1

You are seeing this behaviour because authoryear-comp internally sets sortcites=true. That option causes citations to be sorted as the works would be cited in the bibliography. This is crucial for the compact/compressed style you use, since all permutations of \cite{knuth:ct:b,sigfridsson,knuth:ct:a} should come out as "Knuth 1984, 1986; Sigfridsson and Ryde 1998".

If you don't want any sorting in the citations at all and prefer to determine the sorting manually, you can disable the sorting with sortcites=false. This will seriously damage the -comp bit of authoryear-comp, though. Unless you sort the entries manually, you will more often than not end up with authoryear rather than authoryear-comp.

Since the multi-cite commands are not sorted by default (see Sorting citations using \cites command in biblatex), you could use \textcites to suppress the sorting

\textcites{hartmascolell}{evans}

It is possible to sort the citations with a different sorting template than the bibliography, see Biblatex: how to automatically sort citation by year (sortcites=ynt) when references are sorted by name (sorting=nyt).