Interim Rank Biases of Subjective Performance Evaluation in Contests

Abstract

Although research on contests has shown that the unique characteristics of contests generate specific behavioral patterns between contestants, we know little about the ways in which such characteristics influence evaluators who subjectively assess contestants’ performance. We investigate cognitive errors of performance evaluations in contests and propose that the evaluators’ subjective performance assessments can be biased and distorted because of evaluators’ expectations that contestants perform poorly if they have limited opportunities for upward mobility and face significant threats of downward mobility (i.e., the interim ranking effects). An analysis of figure skating competition data supports our predictions.