Biases and Strategic Behavior in Performance Evaluation: The Case of the FIFA’s Best Soccer Player Award

Tom Coupé, Olivier Gergaud and Abdul Noury ()

Working Papers in Economics from University of Canterbury, Department of Economics and Finance

Abstract: In this paper, we study biases in performance evaluation by analyzing votes for the FIFA Ballon d’Or award for best soccer player, the most prestigious award in the sport. We find that ‘similarity’ biases are substantial, with jury members disproportionately voting for candidates from their own country, own national team, own continent, and own league team. Further, we show that the impact of these biases on the total number of votes a candidate receives is fairly limited and hence is likely to affect the outcome of this competition only on rare occasions where the difference in quality between the leading candidates is small. Finally, analyzing the incidence of ‘strategic voting’, we find jury members who vote for one leading candidate are more, rather than less, likely to also give points to his main competitor, as compared with neutral jury members. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of awards, elections and performance evaluation systems in general, and for the FIFA Ballon d’Or award in particular.

Keywords: Award; Bias; Voting; Soccer (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 Z2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2016-10-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-hrm and nep-spo
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https://repec.canterbury.ac.nz/cbt/econwp/1624.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Biases and Strategic Behaviour in Performance Evaluation: The Case of the FIFA's best soccer player award (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cbt:econwp:16/24

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