ODA research seminar by Tobias Kretschmer, Imperial Business School & LMU Munich

The ODA Section invites you to an ODA research seminar presented by Tobias Kretschmer, Imperial Business School & LMU Munich:

Platform Governance and the Social Proximity Reward in Expert Evaluations: Evidence From Competitive Ballroom Dancing

Abstract
We propose that platform governance can reduce the social proximity reward in evaluations stemming from evaluators’ prior social ties with the evaluated. Specifically, greater attention, more exogenous matching (between evaluator and evaluated), and evaluators’ greater domain expertise should reduce this reward. We test these predictions using 105,287 scoring decisions from 151 ballroom dance competitions held between 2017 and 2023. We examine governance-imposed variation in evaluation format (solo versus group dances) and assignment (organizer-selected versus centrally assigned panels), as well as differences in judges’ domain expertise. We find that a one-standard-deviation increase in past judge-couple tie strength is associated with 0.027 additional points on a 0-10 scale, equivalent to 0.64 rounds closer to the final. Solo dances reduce this reward by 29%, and it is statistically indistinguishable from zero in centrally assigned panels. Contrary to our prediction, the reward increases with domain expertise. Relative to judges at the 10th percentile of expertise, it is 54% larger at the median and 133% larger at the 90th percentile. While some research on multi-sided platforms has largely treated evaluations as given quality signals, we show that evaluation format and evaluator matching can reduce the social proximity reward in expert evaluations.

Everyone is welcome!