Are National Basketball Association referees racially biased?
Business and Public Policy professor Justin Wolfers tried to answer this question in a lecture last night in Logan Hall.
The lecture was coordinated and hosted by the Philosophy, Politics and Economics department and had about 50 students in attendance.
Wolfers's paper on the subject, co-authored with fellow economist Joe Price, provides statistical evidence to back up his assertion that NBA referees do in fact have an "own-race bias."
These findings, released last spring, sparked a great deal of controversy within the NBA and the national media and prompted the NBA to conduct its own research.
"We chose to look at basketball because our findings can be used to make inferences about other settings as well," said Wolfers.
Refereeing a basketball game, which requires individuals to make subjective evaluations of others very quickly, provides insight into similar biases in law enforcement, education and other areas, he added.
Using statistics dating back to 1991, Wolfers and Price discovered that when the three referees in a game are all of one race - white or black - players of that same race are called on 4 percent fewer fouls and earn up to 2.5 more points. While this may seem like a relatively small amount, those 2.5 points can change the outcome of close games.
According to their findings, having an all-white or all-black referee crew could change the outcome in 3.4 percent of NBA games, or 1.8 percent of the games in which the race of the referee crew matched that of the players in the game.
Wolfers said he was "genuinely surprised" about the findings, since the NBA involves such a high level of transparency and continual feedback on referee accuracy.
"It's an interesting context - hopefully students learned from thinking substantively about discrimination and can apply their tools to broader social debates," Wolfers remarked.
"This issue generated a great deal of press when the article first came out," said Sumantra Sen, associate director of the PPE program. "We thought it would be interesting for our students to hear more about it."
"It was a very convincing analysis," said Wharton sophomore Nikhil Kumar. "After hearing him speak, I'm sold."
