Alex Krumer: Nationalistic bias among international experts

Velkommen til seminar med professor Alex Krumer, Høgskolen i Molde

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. In order to test this claim empirically, we exploit within-performance variation of scores from all World Cup, World Championship, and Olympic Games competitions between seasons 2010/11 and 2016/17. Our findings confirm that judges assign significantly higher scores to their compatriots. Further analysis reveals that the magnitude of the nationalistic bias is significantly higher in more corrupt countries, according to the Corruption Perceptions Index. Moreover, out of the 12 most observed countries in our data, only Norway and Finland had negligible estimates of the nationalistic bias both statistically and economically. However, in contrast to previous studies, we do not find that judges assign significantly different scores to jumpers whose compatriots are present on the judging panel. We discuss our findings in the context of the growing debates about the importance of replication studies and crowdsourced research.