Does bias play a role in judging Olympic events?

When we think of the athletes who appear in the next Olympic Games, we like to believe that talent and effort are the only factors that are going to determine their sports performance. But is this really the case? In ski-jumping competitions, athletes compete on their distance and their jumping style, where the latter is assessed by a jury consisting of 5 judges. Professor Jan Bouwens (Accounting section, Amsterdam Business School), together with Christian Hofman and Christopher Lechner (both Munich School of Management) explored potential bias among judges in this sport using archival professional skiing data. Their paper Transparency and Biases in Subjective Performance Evaluation came up with interesting findings on favoritism in judging Olympic events. The authors also offer potential solutions to this problem. Nationality bias. It was recently established that judges favor athletes from the same nation.