11.03.2021

International media features study on professional ski jumping

11.03.2021 – Judges in ski jumping assign significantly higher scores to their compatriots. This main finding of a study, jointly conducted by Alex Krumer, Felix Otto and Tim Pawlowski (forthcoming in the Scandinavian Journal of Economics), was recently discussed in several countries.

Abstract: Ski jumping competitions involve subjective evaluations by judges from different countries. This may lead to nationalistic bias, according to which judges assign higher scores to their compatriots. To test this claim empirically, we exploit within-performance variation of scores from all World Cup, World Championship, and Olympic Games competitions between the 2010/11 and 2016/17 seasons. Our findings confirm that judges assign significantly higher scores to their compatriots. The magnitude of this nationalistic bias is significantly higher in more corrupt countries. We do not find that judges assign significantly different scores to jumpers whose compatriots are present on the judging panel.

Preprint: @ResearchGate

Reference: Krumer, A., Otto, F. & Pawlowski, T. (2021). Nationalistic bias among international experts: Evidence from professional ski jumping. Scandinavian Journal of Economics, forthcoming.

YouTube: Reading Online Sport Economics Seminar (ROSES)

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