Behavior Under Social Pressure: Empty Italian Stadiums and Referee Bias
By Per Pettersson-Lidbom, Mikael Priks. Social Science Research Network, 2010
227 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper studies how social pressure affects the behavior of soccer referees. We make use of an attractive source of exogenous variation in the number of spectators at matches. Due to recent hooligan violence, the Italian government has implemented a regulation that forces some soccer teams to temporarily play home matches in empty stadiums. We find that referees punish away players more harshly and home players more lightly when the games are played in front of spectators compared to when they are not. This indicates that referees exhibit home bias caused by social pressure from the spectators.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a1def8eebb191a7e6b9e9f195c32fd3e11d7557b
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Clinical Psychology
In Economics and Econometrics
- Babatunde Buraimo
- Rob Simmons
- Dominik Schreyer
- Adam Cox
- David Forrest
- J. Reade
- Carl Singleton
- Alex Bryson
In Gender Studies
- Babatunde Buraimo
- Rob Simmons
- Dominik Schreyer
- Adam Cox
- David Forrest
- J. Reade
- Carl Singleton
- Alex Bryson
Citations in the corpus
- Eliminating Supportive Crowds Reduces Referee Bias (2021, background): “Ponzo and Scoppa (2018) studied football matches in Italy where teams shared the same home stadium, ruling out differences in travel fatigue and familiarity.”
- The 12th man?: refereeing bias in English and German soccer (2010, background): “In a paper on referee bias in Italian football, Pettersson-Lidbom and Priks (2007) argued that referees were more likely to award yellow and red cards to home team players where the authorities had ordered games to be played in empty stadia following previous crowd trouble.”
- Causal effects of an absent crowd on performances and refereeing decisions during Covid-19 (2020, background): “Past studies have shown that playing behind closed doors, in one-off matches, especially reduces aspects of football home advantage (Pettersson-Lidbom and Priks, 2010; Reade et al., 2020).”