Self-promotion and Judged Performance: Evidence from Professional Surfing

Self-promotion plays a crucial role in shaping performance evaluations across various domains, yet its effects remain difficult to quantify. This paper examines how strategic self-promotion influences subjective performance assessments in high-stakes, competitive sports environments. We leverage the unique setting of professional surfing, where athletes can engage in nonverbal self-promotion by claiming a wave before receiving their score from a panel of judges. Using data from over 5,500 waves in the World Surf League, we show that claiming significantly improves judged performance evaluations, increasing wave scores by 0.78–1.08 standard deviations (1.6–2 points on a 10 point scale). Female surfers are far less likely than their male counterparts to engage in claiming, yet they receive comparable rewards when they do. These findings provide evidence on the role of self-promotion as a strategic tool for influencing subjective evaluations of performance, and highlight gender disparities in the adoption of such behaviors, in high-stakes competitive environments.