Our 140th Reading Online Sport Economics Seminar meets at 2:30pm UK time, 9:30am Eastern United States Time, 3:30pm Central European Time, and on Teams.<\/p>\n
Title<\/strong>: Compatriot bias in football: Are non-experts subjective?<\/p>\n Abstract<\/strong>: The paper explores the phenomenon of compatriot bias in non-experts’ comments by utilizing data from the FIFA video game, which incorporates crowd-sourced player ratings. We compare the sentiments expressed by compatriots and non-compatriots in the comments section, approximating the nationality of commenters based on their IP addresses. According to our results, compatriots had positive sentiment but for popular players it is lower compared to less popular. This suggests that the size of the compatriot bias depends on player popularity. We provide a theoretical background in the Hotteling-Downs framework to explain the latter effect. Results of this analysis helps to understand the reliability of crowd-sourced player skill estimates and uncover potential nationality-based favoritism among non-experts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"