Efficiency and Inefficiency in the Ranking in Competitions: the Case of the Queen Elisabeth Music Contest

Herbert Glejser and Bruno Heyndels

Journal of Cultural Economics, 2001, vol. 25, issue 2, 109-129

Abstract: The Queen Elisabeth Contest is one of the most prestigious competitions in classical music. For both the artists who participate and for the public, it is important that the ranking of the finalists be affected as little as possible by exogenous factors relating to the organisation of the competition. Still, it is impossible to control for all contingencies. Thus, the ranking can be expected to deviate from that obtained in a hypothetical full-information assessment process. As such, the ranking may be unfair to the candidates and inefficient in providing information to the consumer. Deviations from the full-information ideal may result from self-selection of candidates, from positive information at the margin, and from differences in circumstances. Analysing data on all piano and violin versions of the Contest over the period 1956–1999, we find strong evidence of biases in the rankingprocess. Confirming previous research, we find that musicians who perform later in the final week or later on a given day in this week (on average) obtain a better classification. Further, in the piano competitions women obtain lower rankings and, prior to 1990, finalists from the Soviet Union obtained higherrankings than average. The jury appreciates innovation in the sense that musicians who perform a more recently composed concerto obtain a higher rank. Finally – especiallyfor violin – the candidate's decision to perform a popular concerto leadsto a lower ranking. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2001

Keywords: classical music; contests; expert information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1007659804416 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jculte:v:25:y:2001:i:2:p:109-129

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10824/PS2

DOI: 10.1023/A:1007659804416

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Cultural Economics is currently edited by Federico Etro and Douglas Noonan

More articles in Journal of Cultural Economics from Springer, The Association for Cultural Economics International Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().