` DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES Biases in Voting - The Case of the FIFA Best Player Award Tom Coupe (Kyiv School of Economics) Olivier Gergaud (KEDGE Business School) Abdul Noury (New York University Abu Dhabi) DP# 57 March 2016 Kyiv School of Economics and Kyiv Economics Institute Dmytrivska St. 92-94, Office 404, 01135 Kyiv, Ukraine Phone: (+380 44) 492-8012, Fax: (+380 44) 492-8011 E-mail: [email protected], Internet: www.kse.org.ua Biases in Voting - The Case of the FIFA Best Player Award Tom Coupe* Kyiv School of Economics. Olivier Gergaud KEDGE Business School Abdul Noury New York University Abu Dhabi March 2016 Abstract In this paper, we show that voters are biased but not strategic when voting for the FIFA best player award, the most prestigious award in soccer. We find that ‘similarity’ biases are substantial. Voters are four times more likely to vote for candidates with whom they share the national team or the same league team, and three times more likely to vote for a candidate with whom they share the same nationality. Despite presence of biases, we find little evidence for ‘strategic voting’, as voters who vote for one leading candidate (Messi) are more, rather than less, likely to also vote for his main competitor (Ronaldo). We also show that the impact of these biases on the total number of votes a candidate receives is fairly limited, as all candidates are likely to benefit (and lose) from these biases to a similar extent. The biases highlighted here could affect the outcome of the FIFA best player competition in the rare occasions where the difference in quality between the leading candidates is tiny. JEL Codes: D72, Z2 Keywords: bias; voting; football Wordcount: 8078 Corresponding author: Tom Coupe - [email protected] 1 1. Introduction Awards and prizes play an important role in modern societies (Frey and Neckermann, 2008) as illustrated by the existence of a vast array and growing number of awards. Awards, Honors & Prizes1, a yearly publication, describes awards given for achievements in virtually every field of endeavor. The number of awards has been growing steadily over time since the first edition some 35 years ago, with the 2015 edition containing references to some 20,000 awards and prizes. Despite this impressive trend relatively little research has been done so far to assess the economic impact of receiving awards and prizes, or whether awards and prizes indeed reward the most talented artist, scientist or athlete. The gap needs to be filled as awards, honors and prizes play a crucial part in the concentration of wealth nowadays. As stated by John Kenneth Galbraith in his book review of the successful book by Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook (1995)2 "The premise of The Winner-Take-All Society, very simply, is that the one who wins gets it all. It includes the prize, the fame, and—what is evidently one of the great attractions of modern sports—the money from endorsing shoes, tennis rackets, and so on. If you come in second in the race or tournament, you get nothing or not very much. As in sports, so generally in the modern economic world". Indeed, many major sport associations award athletes for outstanding performance. Some use complicated algorithms to identify the best athlete. In Tennis (APT and WTA) and Cycling (UCI), for example, the ‘best’ athlete is computed based on a mathematical formula that gives higher weights to victories in more prestigious tournaments. Other sports associations instead of using a formula, use elections to choose the best athlete of the year or competition. The National Basket Association (NBA) has a Most Valuable Player Award, the National Hockey League has the Hart Trophy, the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) has a Ballon d’Or, all elections in which votes of experts (media representatives, leading players, trainers) determine who deserves the award. In an ideal world, such elections would elect the best candidate to win the contest. In practice, however, elections do now always select the best candidate as has been shown by several studies that focus on non-sports related elections. For example, for musical competitions, Ginsburgh and Van Ours (2003) find that jury members are influenced by the order of appearance of candidates, Tsay (2013) documents that judges are influenced more by what they see than what they hear, and Ginsburgh and Noury (2008) show that linguistic and cultural proximities between singers and voters are important predictors of success. Similarly, for academic awards, Hamermesh and Schmidt (2003) found that descriptive characteristics of candidates (like affiliation or subspecialty) affect the voters, while Combes, Linnemer and Visser (2008) found that linkages between jury members and candidates, such as working at the same university or the jury member being the Ph. D. advisor of the candidate, matter. Finally, in the context of political elections, Bergren et al (2006) show that candidate’s beauty matters while Webster and Pierce (2015) show that voters are more likely to vote for candidates who have an age similar to them. In this paper, we contribute to this literature on biases in voting by analyzing the voting for the most prestigious best player award in soccer, the FIFA Best Player Award (also known as the Ballon d’Or), an award, which according to the FIFA’s ‘rules of allocation’, is ‘bestowed according to on- field performance and overall behavior on and off the pitch3’. Best player awards are very popular 1 Published by Gale, Cengage Learning. 2 https://hbr.org/1995/11/the-winner-takes-allsometimes. 3 http://resources.fifa.com/mm/document/ballon-dor/playeroftheyear-men/02/46/27/12/rulesofallocation2014- en_neutral.pdf 2 in soccer. Besides the FIFA best player award, there is a best African player Award, a best South American player Award and a best Asian player award. Moreover, L'Equipe, the leading French sports newspaper, and the Guardian, a major newspaper in the UK, both publish their own ranking of the top 100 best players of the year. Like in the case of the FIFA award, for these awards, a selected group of voters selects and ranks a given number of players from a long list of candidates. The FIFA best player award is an interesting case study as the FIFA elections, like many of the sports awards decided based on elections, have been marred in scandals and allegations of biased voting4. This is especially true for the FIFA elections where information on how each voter voted is made public. As a consequence, every year articles appear in the popular press that list the unexpected votes of some high profile voters, with allegations of both strategic voting and similarity voting. For example, a Guardian Blog quipped “The two frontrunners were not the only men guilty of tactical voting. The Portugal coach did not rate Messi in his top three; the Argentina coach voted for three Argentinians; the Brazil coach picked Neymar; and the Germany manager selected three Germans. The levels of bias and favouritism in the voting make the Eurovision song contest look positively objective5.” And a South African webpage observed “In fact, it was only the captains, whose compatriots and teammates weren’t amongst the nominees, that seemed to make remotely objective votes. 6” In this paper, we add to this popular debate on biased voting in the Ballon d’Or elections by presenting evidence about the incidence and the impact of two kinds of biases that can affect voting outcomes. First, we evaluate how ‘similarity’ between voters and the candidates affects voting behavior. There is a large literature in social sciences documenting that people tend to be attracted to people who are similar to them (see for example, Montoya et al., 2008). This also extends to voting behavior: that similarity affects how voters judge candidates has been found in both experimental and survey data. Using experiments, Bailenson et al. (2008) show voters prefer candidates with faces similar to their own, especially for unfamiliar candidates. Using survey data, Caprara et al. (2007) show voters prefer candidates whose traits they rate most similar to their own. Similarly, Cutler (2002) shows Canadian voters are more likely to support candidates with whom they have a common gender, location or language7. One possible explanation of why similarity might matter is that similarity can validate the voter’s own characteristics (Kaptein et al. 2014): in other words, if a candidate with your characteristics wins the elections, your characteristics will be deemed valuable. Second, we evaluate the importance of ‘strategic’ voting. Strategic voting occurs when the ranking of candidates by a voter does not correspond to the voter’s true preferences. Several papers provide evidence for the importance of strategic voting. Fujiwara (2011) uses Brazilian data to show that lower placed candidates get higher vote shares in the first round of a two-round election (dual ballot), compared to when there is only a single round election, suggesting that voters vote for the top candidates rather than their preferred candidates in single round elections. Similarly, Alvareza et al. (2006) find that in the UK, voters are less likely to support a party when this party is unlikely to win. In rank-order elections like the FIFA best player award, voters have an incentive to behave strategically. Indeed, a major criticism of ranked order voting methods is that they are fragile to 4 There have been allegations of votes being changed ex post, voters being influenced by politicians, being biased against specific countries, being biased in favor of some clubs and being biased against defenders. 5 http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/jan/13/strange-ballon-dor-voting-cristiano-ronaldo-lionel-messi- javier-mascherano 6 http://www.soccerladuma.co.za/news/articles/categories/generic/bias-in-ballon-d-or-voting-revealed/197939 7 There is also a large literature in economics documenting home bias in international trade and equity home bias puzzle.