J. Atsu Amegashie () (University of Guelph; Department of Economics)
Abstract
Using the popular FOX TV reality show, American Idol, this paper makes a contribution to the literatures on the design of contests, the allocation of voting rights in committees, and the desirability of low-powered incentive schemes. In 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 is noisier.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by University of Guelph, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
0708.
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.
[Downloadable!]
Other versions:
Board, Oliver J. & Blume, Andreas & Kawamura, Kohei, 2007.
"Noisy talk,"
Theoretical Economics,
Society for Economic Theory, vol. 2(4), pages 395-440, December.
[Downloadable!]
Derek J. Clark & Kai A. Konrad, 2005.
"Contests with multi-tasking,"
Discussion Papers
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, 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!]
Other versions:
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: