Favoritism Under Social Pressure

Luis Garicano, Ignacio Palacios-Huerta and Canice Prendergast

No 8376, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper provides empirical evidence of favoritism by agents, where that favoritism is generated by social pressure. To do so, we explore the behavior of professional soccer referees. Referees have discretion over the addition of extra time at the end of a soccer game (called injury time), to compensate for lost time due to unusual stoppages. We test for systematic bias shown by Spanish referees in favor of home teams. We show that referees systematically favor home teams by shortening close games where the home team is ahead, and lengthening close games where the home team is behind. They show no such bias for games that are not close. We further show that when the rewards for winning games increase, referees change their bias accordingly. We also identify that the mechanism through which bias operates is the referees' desire to satisfy the crowd, by documenting how the size and composition of the crowd affect referee favoritism.

JEL-codes: D8 J2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001-07
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Published as Luis Garicano & Ignacio Palacios-Huerta & Canice Prendergast, 2005. "Favoritism Under Social Pressure," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 87(2), pages 208-216, 05.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w8376.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Favoritism Under Social Pressure (2001)
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:nbr:nberwo:8376

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w8376

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().