When a judging scandal marred the pairs figure skating competition in the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, economist Eric Zitzewitz saw the perfect research subject. Behind the allegations of vote-trading and ties to the Russian mafia was a case study in how organizations make decisions when some members are clearly biased, says Mr. Zitzewitz, a business professor at Stanford University in California.

Surprisingly, his findings suggest that biases may help with decisionmaking. Important information is lost when "outlying" opinions are eliminated, he explains in the spring 2006 issue of The Journal of Economics and Management Strategy. Worse, "truncating" opinions makes it easier for an organization, such as a panel of Olympic figure-skating judges, to fall into vote-trading.

"I think people have this intuition that if someone's saying something very different than what other people are saying, they assume they're wrong or just biased," Zitzewitz says by phone from his Stanford office.

Instead, organizations should extract the useful knowledge from biased opinions while correcting for the bias. "You might imagine designing a process where you give people with strong opinions more weight," he says.

Under the old judging system, national skating federations chose the judges who went to the Olympics. The federations appeared to favor judges who gave their compatriots higher scores, Zitzewitz says. He determined this by analyzing scoring data, employing a technique used to analyze forecasts by stock-market analysts.

In his research, Zitzewitz found that figure-skating judges gave competitors from their native countries higher scores than other competitors - an average of 0.7 positions higher. "The data suggest that countries are divided into two blocs, with the United States, Canada, Germany, and Italy on one side and Russia, the Ukraine, France, and Poland on the other," Zitzewitz writes.

Once assembled at the Olympics, these apparently patriotic judges caused problems, the study says, because of the way scores were counted. If the competition came down to two skaters, their rankings would be determined by which one was higher on a majority of the judges' scorecards. So if a majority was created by judges colluding to reinforce each other's biases - as the French and Russian judges allegedly did in 2002 - then the opinions of more objective judges wouldn't count, even if they more accurately reflected how skaters performed.

This Olympics judging scenario can translate to the boardroom, Zitzewitz says. A committee deciding whether to promote an employee shouldn't discount the extreme opinion of a manager who has worked closely with the employee. Not only does excluding the opinion bury useful information, it can also push that manager to engage in vote-trading with regard to other promotions, as in, "If you vote my way on this one, I'll vote your way next time."

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