In the very popular FOX TV reality show, American Idol, the judges, who are presumably experts in evaluating singing effort, have no voting power when the field is narrowed to the top twenty-four contestants. It is only the votes of viewers that count. In the 2007 season of the show, one of the judges, Simon Cowell, threatened to quit the show if a contestant, Sanjaya Malakar, who was clearly a low-ability contestant, won the competition. He was concerned that the show was becoming a popularity contest instead of a singing contest. Is this a problem? Not necessarily. I show that, under certain conditions, making success in the contest dependent on a contestant’s popularity and not solely on her singing ability or performance, could paradoxically increase aggregate singing effort. It may be optimal to give the entire voting power to the viewers whose evaluation of singing effort or ability is noisier.
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Paper provided by CESifo GmbH in its series CESifo Working Paper Series with number
CESifo Working Paper No. 2171.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Andreas Blume & Oliver Board & Kohei Kawamura, 2007.
"Noisy Talk,"
ESE Discussion Papers
167, Edinburgh School of Economics, University of Edinburgh.
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Board, Oliver J. & Blume, Andreas & Kawamura, Kohei, 2007.
"Noisy talk,"
Theoretical Economics,
Society for Economic Theory, vol. 2(4), December.
[Downloadable!]
Derek J. Clark & Kai A. Konrad, 2005.
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125, SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems, Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Bonn, University of Mannheim, University of Munich, revised May 2006.
[Downloadable!]
Benny Moldovanu & Aner Sela & Xianwen Shi, 2007.
"Contests for Status,"
Journal of Political Economy,
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[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Benny Moldovanu & Aner Sela & Xianwen Shi, 2005.
"Contests for Status,"
Discussion Papers
139, SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems, Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Bonn, University of Mannheim, University of Munich.
[Downloadable!]
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Matthias Kräkel & Petra Nieken & Judith Przemeck, 2008.
"Risk Taking in Winner-Take-All Competition,"
Discussion Papers
233, SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems, Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Bonn, University of Mannheim, University of Munich.
[Downloadable!]
Other versions: