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Favouritism and Financial Incentives: A Natural Experiment
Author(s) -
RICKMAN NEIL,
WITT ROBERT
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
economica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.532
H-Index - 65
eISSN - 1468-0335
pISSN - 0013-0427
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0335.2007.00605.x
Subject(s) - harm , incentive , natural experiment , context (archaeology) , measure (data warehouse) , natural (archaeology) , social psychology , economics , psychology , actuarial science , microeconomics , statistics , computer science , mathematics , paleontology , history , archaeology , database , biology
Principals who exercise favouritism towards certain agents may harm those who are not so favoured. We address this issue in the context of a natural experiment from English soccer. We study the effects of professional referees on a common measure of referee bias: length of injury time in close matches. We find that referees exercised a degree of favouritism prior to professionalism but not afterwards, having controlled for selection and soccer‐wide effects. We also discuss the suitability of the variable that we, and others, use to measure favouritism, noting that alternative interpretations may be possible.