Favouritism and Financial Incentives: A Natural Experiment

Neil Rickman and Robert Witt ()

No 4968, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Principals who exercise favouritism towards certain agents may harm those who are not so favoured. Other papers have produced evidence consistent with the presence of such favouritism but have been unable to consider methods for controlling it. We address this issue in the context of a natural experiment from English soccer, where one particular league introduced professional referees in 2001-02, thereby changing the financial incentives and monitoring regime faced by these referees. Because the change was not effected in all leagues, the ‘experiment’ has both cross-sectional and intertemporal dimensions. We study the effects of professional referees on an established measure of referee bias: length of injury time in close matches. We find that referees exercised favouritism prior to professionalism but not afterwards, having controlled for selection and soccer-wide effects. The results are consistent with a financial incentive effect as a result of professional referees and indicate that subtle aspects of principal-agent relationships (such as favouritism) are amenable to contractual influence.

Keywords: favouritism; financial incentives; referee; soccer (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D80 J20 J44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations View citations in EconPapers (4) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cepr.org/pubs/dps/DP4968.asp (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Favouritism and Financial Incentives: A Natural Experiment (2008)
Working Paper: Favouritism and financial incentives: A natural experiment (2005)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:4968

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.cepr.org/pubs/dps/DP4968.asp

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers
Address: Centre for Economic Policy Research, 77 Bastwick Street, London EC1V 3PZ
Series data maintained by ().