Queen Elisabeth Competition : Judges Analysis

In various areas of life people judge the performance of other people through a system of jury voting. Examples include cultural events where the level of quality is judged by people with different backgrounds. The existing literature dealing with voting and judgement behavior generally focuses on the properties of the decision rules which aggregate the jury evaluation. We focus our analysis on the characteristics of the jury evaluation, i.e. how their evaluation affects the outcomes of the decision rule and to what extent this is due to the decision rule itself. We take as a case study the The Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition for which some historical data is available. The Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition of Belgium, founded in 1937, is among the world's most prestigious and demanding music competitions. It alternates between cello, piano, violin, and voice and consists of three rounds in which each candidate gives a recital. Each round leads to the selection of a subset of candidates.