Do Experts and Laypersons Differ? Some Evidence from International Classical Music Competitions

Do experts and laypersons differ in their judgements of quality? We investigate this question in the context of classical music performance, taking advantage of the fact that in many international music competitions, lay audiences as well as expert juries award prizes. This allows us to proxy for shared judgement as a situation in which the audience prize and the jury’s first prize are awarded to the same person or group. Using data on 370 competition-editions held between 1979 and 2021 across nine competition-types (e.g., piano, strings, woodwinds and brass, voice, etc.,) hosted in 22 different countries, we find that jury and audience preferences match 38 percent of the time, and that the match between audience and jury varies across competition-types and countries. We then explore gender bias and host country bias as possible explanations for the divergence between jury and audience judgements by comparing first prizewinners and audience prizewinners with other finalists. Additionally, we exploit the fact that many musicians compete repeatedly to examine the predictive value of prizewinning on success in future competitions. We find that being female and being from the competition host country reduce the likelihood of being a jury’s top choice but have no impact on the likelihood of winning an audience prize. Additionally, winning an audience prize predicts winning future competitions but being ranked first by the jury does not. Our findings suggest that expert juries are more biased than lay audiences along the dimensions of nationality and gender