Nationalistic Bias among International Experts: Evidence from Professional Ski Jumping

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.