Ski jumping competitions involve subjective evaluations by judges from different countries. This may lead to nationalistic bias, according to which judges assign higher scores to their compatriots. To test this claim empirically, we exploit within-performance variation of scores from all World...

After the expansion of the FIFA World Cup from 32 to 48 teams starting from the 2026 edition, the initial proposal was to split the 48 national teams into 16 groups of three. Among other drawbacks, this proposal provides potential for collusion. Recently, after widespread criticism, FIFA...

The order of actions in contests may generate different psychological effects which, in turn, may influence contestants' probabilities to win. The Prouhet-Thue-Morse sequence in which the first 'n' moves is the exact mirror image of the next 'n' moves should theoretically terminate any advantage...

We exploit a natural experiment in which two professionals compete in a one-stage contest without strategic motives and where one contestant has a clear exogenous psychological momentum advantage over the other in order to estimate the causal effect of psychological momentum on performance. We...

We study a best-of-three all-pay contest with two players in which the first player to win two games wins the contest. Each player has a value of winning the contest as well as a value of winning a single game. It is assumed that a player’s value of winning a game in his home field is...