29.09.2023

DFG Research Grant in Sport Economics

The German Research Foundation (DFG) recently awarded a research grant for a new project in sport economics which intends to explore the effectiveness of different measures for mitigating biases in judging panels.

Subjective performance evaluations (SPEs) are commonly used by organizations to assess, select, and rank candidates in different competitive situations; for instance, in education for assessing and selecting students, in research for assessing and selecting grant applicants, in the labor market for assessing and selecting job applicants, or in sports for judging the performance of athletes and determining champions.

Since many of such SPEs have serious economic consequences for both candidates and organizations, individual or panels of experts are usually appointed to ensure the quality of evaluation. There is, however, substantial evidence for the existence of different biases in SPEs leading to favoritism or discrimination against candidates.

This project intends to exploit rich panel data from real competitive environments with high stakes, i.e., professional sports, in order to better understand both nationalistic and gender bias. Moreover, it intends to explore whether and how much different measures affect these biases by changing ex ante the incentive structure for judges.

The project is funded in the DFG subject area 112-04 Statistics and Econometrics and will be conducted jointly by Prof. Tim Pawlowski, Dr. Felix Otto (both Institute of Sports Science) and Prof. Alex Krumer (Molde University College, NOR).