Modak Chowdhury, S. orcid.org/0000-0002-8386-9144, Jewell, S. and Singleton, C. (2024) Can awareness reduce (and reverse) identity-driven bias in judgement? Evidence from international cricket. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 226. 106697. ISSN 0167-2681
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Natural experiment; Identity; Judgement bias; Social pressure; Home advantage |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Economics (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 14 Aug 2024 14:22 |
Last Modified: | 14 Aug 2024 14:22 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.jebo.2024.106697 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:216143 |