IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp16963.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Can Awareness Reduce (and Reverse) Identity-Driven Bias in Judgement? Evidence from International Cricket

Author

Listed:
  • Chowdhury, Subhasish M

    (University of Sheffield)

  • Jewell, Sarah

    (University of Reading)

  • Singleton, Carl

    (University of Stirling)

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Chowdhury, Subhasish M & Jewell, Sarah & Singleton, Carl, 2024. "Can Awareness Reduce (and Reverse) Identity-Driven Bias in Judgement? Evidence from International Cricket," IZA Discussion Papers 16963, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp16963
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp16963.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    social pressure; judgement bias; identity; natural experiment; home advantage; COVID-19;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D01 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Microeconomic Behavior: Underlying Principles
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • L83 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Sports; Gambling; Restaurants; Recreation; Tourism
    • Z2 - Other Special Topics - - Sports Economics

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp16963. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Holger Hinte (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaade.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.