High-Status Teammates: Award Evaluation in the National Basketball Association

Abstract

Social evaluations proceed in stages. First, judges filter a broad pool of candidates and pick a subset for detailed assessment. Then, the chosen group undergoes a closer examination, during which winners are selected. At both stages of the process, judges are susceptible to bias. Bias is especially commonplace when contenders work in teams because each team member’s merit can be hard to distinguish from that of others. Our paper investigates evaluation bias originating in intrateam status asymmetries. Using the National Basketball Association’s data, we explore how high-status teammates are associated with their colleagues’ chances of winning awards. We find that bias stemming from high-status teammates’ presence is beneficial to their colleagues in the first stage of evaluations because high-status actors increase their team members ‘visibility to judges. However, our results also show that in the second stage of evaluations, the presence of high-status teammates could decrease their colleagues’ chances of winning awards because lower-status actors might seem less worthy of awards when evaluated alongside high-status individuals. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2020.13917 .