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The Impact of Age on Nationality Bias and Cultural Proximity Bias: Evidence from Ski Jumping
Abstract
This empirical research explores the impact of age on nationality and culturalproximity bias. World Cup competition data suggest that judges of professional ski jumping competitions prefer jumpers of their own nationality as wellas those with a similar cultural background and exhibit this preference by rewarding them with better marks. Furthermore, the current study reveals thatthis nationality bias is diminished among younger judges, in accordance withthe reported lower levels of national discrimination among younger generations. The interaction of age and cultural proximity between judge and jumperis insignificant, though.
... Using a similar estimation strategy, Sandberg (2018) showed an analogous result in dressage competitions. More recently, Scholten et al. (2020) used data from 41 World Cup ski jumping competitions and provided suggestive evidence that nationalistic bias is still present. However, the number of events analyzed in their study is limited and the estimation strategy employed misses several key issues making any comparison with the early findings by Zitzewitz (2006) impossible. 2 We replicate and extend the analyses by Zitzewitz (2006) Comparing the score of a compatriot judge to scores of the other members of the panel within each jump, we find that compatriot judges assign close to 0.09 points more compared to their counterparts. ...
... Scholten et al. (2020) neither exploited the within-performance (jump) variation of scores nor controlled for competition fixed effects. Moreover, they did not investigate the possibility of a compensating bias according to which judges assign different scores to jumpers whose compatriots are present on the judging panel. ...
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.
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... However, the data did not allow him to disentangle nationalistic and compensating biases. In addition, a recent paper by Scholten et al. (2020) also found the existence of nationalistic bias in ski jumping competitions by using only two seasons that included 41 World Cup competitions. However, that paper did not exploit the within-performance variation of scores as was done in Zitzewitz (2006), Sandberg (2018), and our paper. ...
... However, that paper did not exploit the within-performance variation of scores as was done in Zitzewitz (2006), Sandberg (2018), and our paper. In addition, Scholten et al. (2020) there is a subjective performance evaluation by a judging panel. This consists of five judges from five different countries, one of which is always from the host nation. ...
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.
With the widespread access of people to the Internet and the increasing usage of social networks in all nations, social networks have become a new source to study cultural similarities and differences. We identified major issues in traditional methods of data collection in cross-cultural studies: difficulty in access to people from many nations, limited number of samples, negative effects of translation, positive self-enhancement illusion, and a few unreported problems. These issues are either causing difficulty to perform a cross-cultural study or have negative impacts on the validity of the final results. In this paper, we propose a framework that aims to calculate cultural distance among several countries using the information and cultural features extracted from social networks. To this aim, the framework estimates the distribution of news-oriented tweets for each nation and computes the cultural distance from these sets of distributions. Based on a sample composed of more than 17 million tweets from late 2017, our framework calculated cultural distance between 22 countries. Our results show a positive correlation between cultural distances computed by our framework and distances computed by Hofstede's cultural scores and also identified connections between some of the cultural features.
The economic literature on the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) establishes empirical evidence for culturally biased voting, more precisely also biases based on geographical closeness, political relations, ethnical and linguistic affinity. The Bundesvision Song Contest (BSC), a similar contest with principally the same rules but organized on the national level in Germany, offers a unique opportunity to compare international voting bias patterns to national voting bias patterns. Thus, this paper presents an innovative analysis by comparatively analyzing the ESC’s historical data from 1998 to 2014 and the BSC’s data from its beginning in 2005 until 2014 with the same econometric methodology. Our results show that voting biases do not only matter in international contests but also occur in similarly organized national contests with roughly similar magnitude and quality—despite the cultural background of participants and voters being much more homogenous.
The immense literature on discrimination treats outcomes as relative: One group suffers compared to another. But does a difference arise because agents discriminate against others – are exophobic – or because they favor their own kind – are endophilic? This difference matters, as the relative importance of the types of discrimination and their inter-relation affect market outcomes. Using a field experiment in which graders at one university were randomly assigned students' exams that did or did not contain the students' names, on average we find favoritism but no discrimination by nationality, and neither favoritism nor discrimination by gender, findings that are robust to a wide variety of potential concerns. We observe heterogeneity in both discrimination and favoritism by nationality and by gender in the distributions of graders' preferences. We show that a changing correlation between endophilia and exophobia can generate perverse predictions for observed market discrimination.
The paper contends that exclusionary views towards out-group populations are formed along two dimensions: exclusion from the country and exclusion from equal rights. Data obtained from the European Social Survey (for twenty-one countries) reveal that objection to the admission of foreigners to the country is more pronounced than objection to the allocation of 'equal rights'. The data further suggest that objection to admission can be directed either at all non-nationals or only at ethnic and racial minorities. 'Total exclusionists' (i.e. support exclusion of all non-nationals) are more likely to support the denial of foreigners from equal rights than 'racial exclusionists' (i.e. support only exclusion of ethnic minorities). Multi-level analyses show that support for exclusion is also influenced by socio-economic characteristics of individuals (e.g. education, political orientation) and characteristics of their countries (e.g. size of the non-European population). The findings are discussed in light of sociological theory.
A recent review of ratee race effects on performance ratings (Landy & Farr, 1980) found conflicting results. For the present research, meta-analytic techniques were used for more substantive conclusions about the existence of ratee race effects and whether the effects were related to rater race or were moderated by situational factors. The five moderators examined included the study setting (laboratory/field), rater training (offered/not offered), type of rating (behavior/trait), rating purpose (administrative/research), and the composition of the workgroup (percentage of blacks in each study). Seventy-four studies with a total sample of 17,159 ratees were located for white raters, whereas 14 studies with 2,428 ratees included data on black raters. The corrected mean correlations between ratee race and ratings for white and black raters were .183 and −.220, respectively, with 95% confidence intervals that excluded zero for both rater groups. Substantial moderating effects were found for study setting and for the saliency of blacks in the sample. Race effects were more likely in field settings when blacks composed a small percentage of the workforce. The appropriate role of laboratory studies and the implications of the results for guiding future research on racial bias are discussed.
This article critically reviews the intersectional locus of public opinion scholarship and immigration studies that make use of data from multinational survey projects. Specifically, it emphasizes current cross-national research seeking to understand the causes, manifestations, and implications of attitudes toward immigrants and immigration in economically advanced countries of the world. Despite rapid expansion, the field suffers from several methodological challenges and theoretical constraints. A succinct exposure of trends and patterns is followed by presentations of influential theoretical perspectives and established individual- and contextual-level determinants. The review suggests that strengthening the conceptual apparatus and enlarging the analytical focus are priorities. It concludes with some observations on how to circumvent these problems and to bridge current research with future explorations of the embedded nature of such public attitudes.
This paper assesses whether and how common characteristics of jury members or peer voters affect the outcomes of voting systems.
In particular, we analyze to what extent these common features result in voting bias. We take as a case study the Eurovision
Song Contest for which an extensive amount of historical data is available. In contrast to earlier studies we analyze the
impact of common factors on the bias individually for each country, which is necessary to substantiate the publicly debated
accusations of regional block voting by certain groups of countries. We establish strong evidence for voting bias in the song
contest on the basis of geography, even after correction for culture, language, religion and ethnicity. However, these effects
do generally not correspond to the usual accusations. We believe that our findings extend to all instances where groups of
jury members or peer voters share certain common factors, which may cause voting bias. It is important to identify such structures
explicitly, as it can help avoiding bias in the first place.
We analyze the voting behavior and ratings of judges in a popular song contest held every year in Europe since 1956. The dataset makes it possible to analyze the determinants of success, and gives a rare opportunity to run a direct test of vote trading. Though the votes cast may appear as resulting from such trading, we show that they are rather driven by quality of the participants as well as by linguistic and cultural proximities between singers and voting countries. Therefore, and contrary to what was recently suggested, there seems to be no reason to take the result of the Contest as mimicking the political conflicts (and friendships).
This paper studies optimal incentive contracts when workers have career concerns--concerns about the effects of current performance on future compensation. The authors show that the optimal compensation contract optimizes total incentives: the combination of the implicit incentives from career concerns and the explicit incentives from the compensation contract. Thus, the explicit incentives from the optimal compensation contract should be strongest for workers close to retirement because career concerns are weakest for these workers. The authors find empirical support for this prediction in the relation between chief-executive compensation and stock-market performance. Copyright 1992 by University of Chicago Press.
Using microdata for 22 countries over the 198594 period, we find that more compressed male wage structures and lower female net supply are both associated with a lower gender pay gap, with an especially large effect for wage structures. Reduced-form specifications indicate that the extent of collective bargaining coverage is also significantly negatively related to the gender pay gap. Together, the wage compression and collective bargaining results suggest that the high wage floors that are associated with highly centralized, unionized wage setting raise women's relative pay, since women are at the bottom of the wage distribution in each country.
This paper uses three years of individual-level data to analyze the determinants of individual preferences over immigration policy in the United States. We have two main empirical results. First, less-skilled workers are significantly more likely to prefer limiting immigrant inflows into the United States. Our finding suggests that, over the time horizons that are relevant to individuals when evaluating immigration policy, individuals think that the U.S. economy absorbs immigrant inflows at least partly by changing wages. Second, we find no evidence that the relationship between skills and immigration opinions is stronger in high-immigration communities. © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technolog
Using the results from the end-of-season (1992-93) league tables, overall home advantage was confirmed in the eight major divisions of the English and Scottish football leagues. The degree of home advantage was found to vary significantly across the divisions. Furthermore, these divisional differences in home advantage were found to be significantly associated with the mean attendance of each division. In an attempt to understand these findings, every occurrence of two influential events (either a sending-off or penalty scored) reported in a national Sunday newspaper was recorded. The overall frequency of both sendings-off and penalties scored favoured the home side, but again this was not constant across the divisions. In divisions with large crowds, the percentage of home sendings-off was relatively small (30%), compared with no difference (50%) in divisions with smaller crowds. Similarly, the percentage of penalties scored by home sides in divisions with the largest crowds was large ( > 70%), in contrast to little or no advantage in divisions with smaller crowds. Two possible explanations for these findings were proposed. Either larger crowds were able to provoke the away player into more reckless behaviour (real fouls), or influence the referee into believing that the away player had committed more fouls (perceived fouls).
How much do cultural biases affect economic exchange? We answer this question by using data on bilateral trust between European
countries. We document that this trust is affected not only by the characteristics of the country being trusted, but also
by cultural aspects of the match between trusting country and trusted country, such as their history of conflicts and their
religious, genetic, and somatic similarities. We then find that lower bilateral trust leads to less trade between two countries,
less portfolio investment, and less direct investment, even after controlling for the characteristics of the two countries.
This effect is stronger for goods that are more trust intensive. Our results suggest that perceptions rooted in culture are
important (and generally omitted) determinants of economic exchange.
I use data from the Olympic sport of dressage to explore in-group biases among judges. Dressage – the only international sport with subjective performance evaluations in which men and women compete as equals – provides a rare opportunity to identify multiple in-group biases in the same naturally occurring setting. While, on average, judges are not biased in favour of either gender, they exhibit substantial biases in favour of (i) athletes of their own nationality, and (ii) athletes of the same nationality as the other judges in the competition. Heterogeneity across competitions suggests that biases increase as group identity becomes more salient. (JEL J15, J16, J71, L83) This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
We analyze how a larger presence of female evaluators affects committee decision-making using information on 100,000 applications to associate and full professorships in Italy and Spain. These applications were assessed by 8,000 randomly selected evaluators. A larger number of women in evaluation committees does not increase either the quantity or the quality of female candidates who qualify. Information from individual voting reports suggests that female evaluators are not significantly more favorable toward female candidates. At the same time, male evaluators become less favorable toward female candidates as soon as a female evaluator joins the committee.
Discrimination against particular groups in the housing market increases search costs and limits optimal matching, thus resulting in economic and social inefficiencies. This paper tests for the existence of discrimination in the French rental market against individuals with names which signal their connection to five immigrant groups (Northern Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, Poland, Portugal-Spain) by implementing an online field study using one of France's largest online advertisements website. The results show that applicants with foreign sounding names coming from Northern Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and Turkey are 16 to 22 percentage points less likely to receive a response than applicants with French names or names associated with Poland, Portugal or Spain. In addition, when applicants with foreign sounding names from any origin receive a response, it is significantly more likely to be negative or include a request for more information than responses to emails including French sounding names. Finally, we find some geographic differences in response rate differentials that are correlated with differences in the local income and share of immigrants. This provides evidence that landlords use names as a proxy for economic and other sociodemographic characteristics.
In the Netherlands, support for ethnic discrimination, that is, support for a disadvantageous treatment of ethnic minorities in the housing and labour market, had decreased in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but has increased since the mid-1980s up to the early 1990s. In this article, we examine the effects of contextual characteristics (period and cohort characteristics) and individual characteristics on support for ethnic discrimination. Hypotheses, derived from Ethnic Conflict Theory, are tested by means of logistic regression analysis, using individual-level pooled data over the period 1979-1993 (N=20,156) as well as national-level time-series data, presumably indicative of period and cohort characteristics. Regarding period characteristics, the results show that support for ethnic discrimination is more widespread in times of high and increasing levels of ethnic immigration, as well as in times of growing unemployment. However, the level of unemployment as such has a negative effect on support for ethnic discrimination. Regarding cohort characteristics, the results show that the higher the level of ethnic immigration and unemployment during the formative years, the more widespread support for ethnic discrimination is. In addition, we found a positive effect of age. Regarding other individual characteristics, support for ethnic discrimination is particularly more widespread among less educated people.
We examine the existence and magnitude of own-nationality bias. Using player-match level data from 12 seasons of the UEFA Champions League (UCL) and referee assignment policies that pair players and referees from the same country, we determine the bias that referees exhibit toward players from their native country. Players officiated by a referee from the same country receive a 10% increase in beneficial foul calls. Referees' own-nationality bias is more pronounced for national team players, players at home, and in later stages of the tournament. Elite referees exhibit as much, or more, own-nationality bias as their less experienced counterparts. (JEL L83, J15)
This study examines ethnic preferences using data from the television cooking show Come Dine With Me in Sweden. Amateur chefs compete by hosting dinner parties. Contestants rate each others' performance and the host with the highest ratings wins a cash prize. The show gives an unorthodox opportunity to study ethnic preferences in a high-stakes game environment. The analysis of the collected data shows that native Swedish contestants rate co-ethnic hosts significantly more favourably than they rate other hosts, demonstrating the existence of co-ethnic preferences. This observation seems to be an outcome of own-group favouritism rather than dislike against other groups. Also, the observed co-ethnic preference is assumed to be subtle or non-conscious based on the nature of the analysed data.
In Germany, Turkish students are overrepresented on lowest school tracks. Research has provided evidence that stereotypical expectations can color judgments. We experimentally investigated whether student information that strongly confirmed or disconfirmed Turkish stereotypical expectations led to student teachers’ judgments that were biased against nationality. Furthermore, we explored whether judging an expectation-confirming or expectation-disconfirming Turkish student resulted in changes in stereotypical beliefs. Results showed that student teachers’ judgments were biased against nationality when it came to an expectation-confirming student and that the expectation-disconfirming student could change stereotypical beliefs into slightly more positive ones. Results are discussed with regard to their theoretical relevance as well as to their importance for teacher education.
Relying on a natural experiment consisting in 130 competitions for promotion to associate and full professor in the Italian University, we analyze whether gender discrimination is affected by the gender of evaluators. Taking advantage of the random assignment of evaluators to each competition, we examine the probability of success of each candidate in relation to the committee gender composition, controlling for candidates’ scientific productivity and a number of individual characteristics. We find that female candidates are less likely to be promoted when the committee is composed exclusively by males, while the gender gap disappears when the candidates are evaluated by a mixed sex committee. Results are qualitatively similar across fields and type of competitions and are robust to the exclusion of candidates who have withdrawn from competition and when controlling for a number of evaluators' characteristics.
We present evidence that shared codes, religious beliefs, ethnicity - cultural proximity - between lenders and borrowers improves the efficiency of credit allocation. We identify in-group preferential treatment using dyadic data on the religion and caste of bank officers and borrowers from a bank in India, and a rotation policy that induces exogenous matching between officers and borrowers. Cultural proximity increases lending on both intensive and extensive margins and improves repayment performance, even after the in-group officer is replaced by an out-group one. Further, cultural proximity increases loan dispersion and reduces loan to collateral ratios. Our results imply that cultural proximity mitigates informational problems that adversely affect lending, which in turn relaxes financial constraints and improves access to finance.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
Recent cohorts have been shown to be less prejudiced than their elders, at least toward blacks. This study addresses two questions: Has this tendency continued among most-recent cohorts of adults? and Does it extend to prejudice toward other ethnic minorities? Using data from a national sample, I focus on stereotype and social distance attitudes pertaining to blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Jews. In general, results indicate that cohorts born after World War II tend to be less prejudiced than prewar cohorts toward each of the four minorities. But most-recent cohorts of Americans show no tendency to be less prejudiced than their immediate predecessors born since World War II, and most-recent cohorts residing outside of the South actually tend to be more prejudiced than their elders.
Olympic dressage involves “an intimate unity between a human and a non-human” and is scored by a subjective judging process, under the auspices of the Fédération Equestre Internationale whose Code of Conduct declares the welfare of the horse as paramount. Dressage is of particular interest to equitation scientists and equine ethologists because it embodies the full range of the stimulus-response contingencies that operate in all of the Olympic disciplines. In Fédération Equestre Internationale dressage competition, collective marks are awarded across four domains immediately after each performance. Collective marks are designed to summarize the performance of horse and rider and must reflect the qualities of the entire performance. They are derived from the observation of the judges of the separate test movements. The 4 collective marks include: (1) paces; (2) impulsion; (3) submission; and (4) the rider's position and seat; correctness and effect of the aids (rider signals). The definition of submission in this context makes reference to lightness and other qualities that align with optimal ridden horse welfare. We assessed the characteristics of these marks in horses competing in the 2008 Olympic Games Grand Prix (GP; n=46) and Grand Prix Special (GPS; n=25) dressage competitions. We also examined the effect of judge location and used Pearson correlation coefficients to explore relationships between collective marks and test-movement scores. All 4 collective marks correlated with each other significantly (P
Following the work of Blumer (1958), I extend and test a theory of prejudice based on perceived threats to dominant racial or national groups by subordinate groups. Perceived threat is hypothesized to be a function of economic conditions and of the size of the subordinate group relative to the dominant group. I test the group-threat theory using a multilevel model that combines population data with survey results on attitudes towards immigrants and racial minorities from Eurobarometer Survey 30. "Group threat" explains most of the variation in average prejudice scores across the 12 countries in the sample and has a small but statistically significant effect on the influence of certain individual-level variables on prejudice. These results demonstrate the importance of perceived intergroup threat in the formation of prejudicial attitudes and suggest a re-interpretation of past findings on the relations between individual characteristics and expressions of prejudice.
The widespread belief that racism among young white adults has increased in the 1980s is scrutinized using 12 racial policy questions from the General Social Surveys and the National Election Studies. Under the assumption that age effects can be treated as negligible, the article evaluates the importance of period and cohort effects in shaping the present racial attitudes of adults who have come of age since 1959. After outlining two possible patterns of differences among cohorts that could have resulted from the impact of historical circumstances during the formative years of early adulthood, the article concludes that there is no indication of decreasing tolerance among cohorts coming of age in the 1980s. Similarly the period effects are seldom significant over the years from 1984-90 and thus show no consistent decline in racial liberalism.
Measuring culture and its dynamics through surveys has important limitations,
but the emerging field of computational social science allows us to overcome
them by analyzing large-scale datasets. In this article, we study cultural
dynamics through the votes in the Eurovision song contest, which are decided by
a crowd-based scheme in which viewers vote through mobile phone messages.
Taking into account asymmetries and imperfect perception of culture, we measure
cultural relations among European countries in terms of cultural affinity. We
propose the Friend-or-Foe coefficient, a metric to measure voting biases among
participants of a Eurovision contest. We validate how this metric represents
cultural affinity through its relation with known cultural distances, and
through numerical analysis of biased Eurovision contests. We apply this metric
to the historical set of Eurovision contests from 1975 to 2012, finding new
patterns of stronger modularity than using votes alone. Furthermore, we define
a measure of polarization that, when applied to empirical data, shows a sharp
increase within EU countries during 2010 and 2011. We empirically validate the
relation between this polarization and economic indicators in the EU, showing
how political decisions influence both the economy and the way citizens relate
to the culture of other EU members.
Summarizes the findings of studies undertaken by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago to measure not only present attitudes toward the Negro but also how the attitudes have changed since 1942. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This paper examines the impact of jury racial composition on trial outcomes using a unique dataset of all felony trials in Sarasota County, Florida between 2004 and 2009. We utilize a research design that exploits day-to-day variation in the composition of the jury pool to isolate quasi-random variation in the composition of the seated jury. We find strong evidence that all-white juries acquit whites more often and are less favorable to black versus white defendants when compared to juries with at least one black member. Using the Anwar-Fang rank order test, we find strong statistical evidence of discrimination on the basis of defendant race. These results are consistent with racial prejudice on the part of white jurors, black jurors, or both. Using a simple model of jury selection and decision-making, we replicate the entire set of empirical regularities observed in the data, including the fact that blacks in the jury pool are just as likely as whites to be seated. Simulations of the model suggest that jurors of each race are heterogeneous in the standards of evidence that they require to convict and that both black and white defendants would prefer to face jurors of the same race.
We study ingroup bias -- the preferential treatment of members of one's group -- in naturally occurring data, where economically significant allocation decisions are made under a strong non-discriminatory norm. Data come from Israeli small claims courts during 2000-2004, where the assignment of a case to an Arab or Jewish judge is effectively random. We find robust evidence for judicial ingroup bias. Furthermore, this bias is strongly associated with terrorism intensity in the vicinity of the court in the year preceding the ruling. The results are consistent with theory and lab evidence according to which salience of group membership enhances social identification.
The effects of rater and ratee race on performance ratings of managers were examined. Ratings were obtained from peers, subordinates and bosses as part of a multirater, developmental feedback program for managers. Two data sets were created for purposes of this study. The between-subjects data set consisted of ratings from over 20,000 bosses, over 50,000 peers, and over 40,000 subordinates. The repeated measures data set was substantially smaller because it included only those Black and White managers who were rated by both a Black and White rater from each of the three perspectives. Results for rater race indicated that Black raters from all perspectives (peers, subordinates, and bosses) assigned more favorable ratings to ratees of their own race. Results for White raters differed according to the particular rating source. White bosses assigned more favorable ratings to ratees of their own race, but White subordinates did not. White peers assigned more favorable ratings to Whites in the repeated measures analysis, but not in the between-subjects analysis. Results for ratee race indicated that both White and Black managers received higher ratings from Black raters than from White raters, and the effect was more pronounced for ratings assigned to Black managers.
Judging bias is an inherent risk in subjectively judged sporting competitions, and recent controversies have spurred researchers to explore these biases wherever possible. Unfortunately, detailed judging results are usually unavailable to the public. For example, the international figure skating scoring system does not allow the study of nationalistic bias, because the scores are reported anonymously. Similarly, the National Basketball Association (NBA) blocked requests for underlying data after a recent academic study of racial bias of NBA referees. This article makes use of a rare case of fully available judging data, examining the diving competitions from the 2000 Summer Olympic Games. We discover strong evidence of nationalistic favoritism in the judging, including one case where the medal standings reasonably could have changed with unbiased judging. We offer a simple framework on which to base future studies of judging bias.
Major League Baseball umpires express their racial/ethnic preferences when they evaluate pitchers. Strikes are called less often if the umpire and pitcher do not match race/ethnicity, but mainly where there is little scrutiny of umpires. Pitchers understand the incentives and throw pitches that allow umpires less subjective judgment (e.g., fastballs over home plate) when they anticipate bias. These direct and indirect effects bias performance measures of minorities downward. The results suggest how discrimination alters discriminated groups' behavior generally. They imply that biases in measured productivity must be accounted for in generating measures of wage discrimination. (JEL J15, J31, J44, J71, L83)
The five-factor model of personality is a hierarchical organization of personality traits in terms of five basic dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience. Research using both natural language adjectives and theoretically based personality questionnaires supports the comprehensiveness of the model and its applicability across observers and cultures. This article summarizes the history of the model and its supporting evidence; discusses conceptions of the nature of the factors; and outlines an agenda for theorizing about the origins and operation of the factors. We argue that the model should prove useful both for individual assessment and for the elucidation of a number of topics of interest to personality psychologists.
Reviewers increasingly are asked to review manuscripts from outside their own country, but whether they are more likely to recommend acceptance of such manuscripts is not known.
To assess whether US reviewers or non-US reviewers evaluate manuscripts differently, depending on whether the manuscripts are submitted from outside the United States or from the United States.
A retrospective analysis of all original submissions received by Gastroenterology in 1995 and 1996. Reviewers ranked manuscripts in 4 decision categories: accept, provisionally accept, reject with resubmission, or reject.
Ranking of papers based on nationality of authors and reviewers.
The percentage of non-US manuscripts placed in each decision category by US (n = 2355) and non-US reviewers (n = 1297) was nearly identical (P= .31). However, US reviewers recommended acceptance of papers submitted by US authors more often than did non-US reviewers (P=.001). Non-US reviewers ranked US papers slightly more favorably than non-US papers (P=.09), while US reviewers ranked US papers much more favorably (P=.001).
Reviewers from the United States and outside the United States evaluate non-US papers similarly and evaluate papers submitted by US authors more favorably, with US reviewers having a significant preference for US papers.
The NBA provides an intriguing place to assess discrimination: referees and players are involved in repeated interactions
in a high-pressure setting, with referees making split-second decisions that might allow implicit racial biases to become
evident. We find that more personal fouls are awarded against players when they are officiated by an opposite-race officiating
crew than when they are officiated by an own-race refereeing crew. These biases are sufficiently large so that they affect
the outcome of an appreciable number of games. Our results do not distinguish whether the bias stems from the actions of white
or black referees.
"This paper exploits nationalistic biases in Olympic winter sports judging to study the problem of designing a decision-making process that uses the input of potentially biased agents. Judges score athletes from their own countries higher than other judges do, and they appear to vary their biases strategically in response to the stakes, the scrutiny given the event, and the degree of subjectivity of the performance aspect being scored. Ski jumping judges display a taste for fairness in that they compensate for the nationalistic biases of other panel members, while figure skating judges appear to engage in vote trading and bloc judging. Career concerns create incentives for judges: biased judges are less likely to be chosen to judge the Olympics in ski jumping but more likely in figure skating; this is consistent with judges being chosen centrally in ski jumping and by national federations in figure skating. The sports truncate extreme scores to different degrees; both ski jumping and, especially, figure skating are shown to truncate too aggressively. Extreme truncation not only discards information, but may also make the vote trading in figure skating easier to implement. These findings have implications for both the current proposals for reforming the judging of figure skating and for designing decision making in organizations more generally." Copyright 2006, The Author(s) Journal Compilation (c) 2006 Blackwell Publishing.
We introduce a new hybrid approach to joint estimation of Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) for high quantiles of return distributions. We investigate the relative performance of VaR and ES models using daily returns for sixteen stock market indices (eight from developed and eight from emerging markets) prior to and during the 2008 financial crisis. In addition to widely used VaR and ES models, we also study the behavior of conditional and unconditional extreme value (EV) models to generate 99 percent confidence level estimates as well as developing a new loss function that relates tail losses to ES forecasts. Backtesting results show that only our proposed new hybrid and Extreme Value (EV)-based VaR models provide adequate protection in both developed and emerging markets, but that the hybrid approach does this at a significantly lower cost in capital reserves. In ES estimation the hybrid model yields the smallest error statistics surpassing even the EV models, especially in the developed markets.
The in-group-out-group bias is among the most well documented and widely observed phenomenon in the social sciences. Despite its role in hiring decisions and job discrimination, negotiations, and conflict and competition between groups, economists have paid little attention to the in-group-out-group bias. We question the universality of the bias by conducting field experiments to test whether it extends to the cooperative behavior of one of the most successful and best-known modern collective societies, the Israeli kibbutz. The facts that kibbutz members have voluntarily chosen their lifestyle of cooperation and egalitarianism, the ease with which they could join the surrounding capitalist society and their disproportionate involvement in social and national causes suggest that if ever there was a society of individuals whose cooperativeness extends equally to members and non-members, the kibbutz is it. Nonetheless, our results indicate that kibbutz members display higher levels of cooperation when paired with anonymous kibbutz members than when paired with city residents. In fact, when paired with city residents, kibbutz members’ observed levels of cooperation are identical to those of the city residents. Moreover, we show that self-selection rather than kibbutz socialization largely accounts for the extent to which kibbutz members are cooperative.
- Miles Hewstone
- Mark Rubin
- Hazel Willis
Hewstone, Miles, Mark Rubin, and Hazel Willis (2002), "Intergroup Bias," Annual Review
of Psychology, 53(1), 575-604.
- Lauren Mclaren
- Mark Johnson
McLaren, Lauren, and Mark Johnson (2007), "Resources, Group Conflict and Symbols: Explaining Anti-Immigration Hostility in Britain," Political Studies, 55(4), 709-732.