published in: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2024, 226, 106697.
Competitions often suffer from biased judgments by officials tied to their social identities. In international cricket, home nation umpires favoured home teams, but neutral umpires were introduced successfully to address this bias. However, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the return of home umpires, creating a natural experiment amid heightened scrutiny, modern technology, and sometimes empty stadiums. Consistent with the predictions of our behavioural model, we find no evidence of in-group bias during the pandemic; instead, we observe evidence of over-compensation. The pre-pandemic home team advantage in 'leg before wicket' decisions vanished, with home umpires seemingly favouring the away opposition, compared with neutral umpires in the period before, especially in more marginal or difficult decisions. This suggests that awareness and scrutiny can not only eliminate identity-driven judgement bias but may even reverse it.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.