How biases can help with decisions

If the decision requires a simple majority, deals are easier to make, Zitzewitz says, so eliminating those outlying opinions eventually means you've lost out on who skated best or would be the better person to promote.

This kind of collusion can come into play in political settings, notes Gary Charness, an economics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "The cautionary note here is that while excluding extremes looks good, it may come at a real cost." he writes in an e-mail.

The International Skating Union voted to change the judging system in June 2002, four months after French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne said she had been pressured by her country's skating federation to give a higher score to the Russian pair, bumping the Canadian pair down to silver. In the wake of the scandal, the International Olympic Committee awarded the Canadians a duplicate gold medal.

The lesson for organizations, Zitzewitz writes in his study, is that the decisionmaking process is more efficient when its participants are most interested in fairness. The apparent nationalism of figure-skating judges trumped that desire, Zitzewitz says.

A "strong but disinterested" group leader could have prevented judges from exaggerating their opinions, he adds.

"Without that chairperson who's going to say 'All of your opinions have been too extreme lately, we're going to listen to all of them less,' [it can] degenerate into a place where every opinion is extreme," Zitzewitz says.

At the heart of the study is the individual whose actions instigated the 2002 judging scandal: Ms. Le Gougne. Last month, the former Olympic judge told the Associated Press that her suffering over the scandal was worth the positive changes it's brought for the sport. "The judges came to see me and said, 'Marie-Reine, the new scoring system is so great, thank you Marie-Reine because without you, there would not have been a new scoring system,' " she said at a skating event in Paris.

But not everyone is as optimistic about the new system, in which nine scores are randomly selected out of 12 judges. The high and the low are dropped, and then the score is averaged and posted anonymously. No longer can spectators boo an ungenerous judge from a certain country, because no one knows which score belongs to whom - not even the judges themselves.

"That's potentially a less positive thing," Zitzewitz says of the anonymity. The new scoring system is, however, more objective, Zitzewitz says, and judges are now chosen by the International Skating Union rather than the individual nations' skating federations.

The new scoring system's popularity faced its first test over the weekend, with medals for the pairs skaters being awarded Monday night.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Zitzewitz's study was how many economists have had a former life in competitive figure skating. "I had students and people from industry conferences approach me and want to help me," Zitzewitz says.

Page: 1 | 2