Referees

The NBA provides an intriguing place to assess discrimination: referees and players are involved in repeated interactions in a high-pressure setting with referees making the type of split-second decisions that might allow implicit racial biases to become evident. We find that more personal fouls are awarded against players when they are officiated by an opposite-race officiating crew than when officiated by an own-race refereeing crew. These biases are sufficiently large that they affect the outcome of an appreciable number of games. Our results do not distinguish whether the bias stems from the actions of white or black referees. JEL codes: K42, J15, J71

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICDCS
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICDCS 2005, Implicit Racial Biases, Opposite-race Officiating Crew, Own-race Refereeing Crew