Abstract
In the popular FOX TV reality show, American Idol, the judges, who are presumably experts in evaluating singing effort, have no voting power when the field is narrowed to the top 24 contestants. It is only the votes of viewers that count. In the 2007 season of the show, one of the judges, Simon Cowell, threatened to quit the show if a contestant, Sanjaya Malakar, who was clearly a low-ability contestant, won the competition. He was concerned that the show was becoming a popularity contest instead of a singing contest. Is this a problem? Not necessarily. I show that, under certain conditions, making success in the contest dependent on a contestant’s popularity and not solely on her singing ability or performance, could paradoxically increase aggregate singing effort. It may be optimal to give the entire voting power to the viewers whose evaluation of singing effort is noisier.
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Notes
Gavious et al. (2002) find that a cap on bids decreases aggregate expenditures, if the contestants have a linear cost of effort. This is in contrast to Che and Gale (1998). The difference stems from the fact that in Che and Gale (1998), the contestants are ex ante asymmetric and this is common knowledge. In Gavious et al. (2002), the contestants are ex ante symmetric but are asymmetric ex post (after independently and privately drawing their types from some continuous distribution). However, Gavious et al. (2002) find that a cap on bids increases aggregate expenditures if the cost of effort is a convex function and the number of contestants is sufficiently large. They find that bid caps lower the bids of high-valuation contestants but increase the bids of middle-valuation contestants.
This means that the fact that runner-ups in American Idol also seem to do well in the music industry is an additional boost to incentives in the contest.
American Idol, which debuted in 2002, is an offshoot of Pop Idol, a British television (singing) reality show which debuted on the ITV network in 2001. As noted at wikipedia.com, the Idol series has become an international franchise; it has spun off many successful shows such as Australian Idol, Latin American Idol, Idols (Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, South Africa), Canadian Idol, Idols West Africa, Indian Idol, Indonesian Idol, New Zealand Idol, Hay Superstar, Nouvelle Star, Pinoy Idol (Philippines), Deutschland sucht den Superstar, Singapore Idol, Malaysian Idol, Vietnam Idol, Music Idol, Ídolos Brazil, Ídolos Portugal, and Super Star.
Some of the top twelve finalists on American Idol have gone on to chalk up successes: six of them of have been nominated for the 2008 Grammy awards. One of them, Carrie Underwood has already won two Grammys and Jennifer Hudson, through the exposure that the show gave her, had the opportunity to star in the movie Dreamgirls which won her an Oscar in 2007. The websites for both shows can be found at: http://www.americanidol.com/ and http://abc.go.com/primetime/dancingwiththestars/index?pn=index.
Note that the Super Bowl and Academy Awards take place only once in a year. In each season, American Idol is shown twice a week over a 4-month period. In this sense, it is the number one rated show in America.
Another way of thinking about how voting by the public can be noisy is to assume that each contestant has a group of loyal supporters who will vote for him or her, regardless of performance. However, each contestant’s group of loyal supporters is unpredictable because a random number of them is either sometimes lazy to vote, forget to vote, choose not to vote because they think their vote will not make a difference anyway, or circumstances beyond their control affect their ability to vote.
A contestant’s performance or effort, among others, includes the time spent rehearsing different songs to determine which song is appropriate, the time spent rehearsing the selected song, etc.
My treatment of the judges’ votes is analogous to the voting rule in Dancing with the Stars and figure skating competitions. Each judge in these contests scores a contestant’s performance out of 10 and a contestants’ overall score is the sum of the judges’ scores. Amegashie (2006) studies the incentive effects of voting by judges in international figure skating within the context of the figure skating scandal at the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
To the extent that the judges’ votes and/or comments are observed by the viewers in both American Idol and Dancing with the Stars before the viewers cast their votes, one may argue that the judges’ votes could affect components of the viewers’ vote function. For simplicity and to allow me focus on the main argument of the article, I do not consider this possible effect.
See Lazear and Rosen (1981) and Nalebuff and Stiglitz (1983). As noted by Lazear and Rosen (1981, fn. 2), “Contests are feasible only if chance is a significant factor.” In the extreme case where the variance of the error terms is zero, the contest becomes a variant of a non-stochastic all-pay auction which is known to have no equilibrium in pure strategies (Hillman and Riley 1989; Baye et al. 1996).
Given that (6a) holds, the objective functions of both contestants are strictly concave for all effort levels and hence the equilibrium effort levels are unique.
The actual interval is [1.8, 2.079).
Based on the Nalebuff and Stiglitz (1983) framework, McLaughlin (1988) found that increasing the variance of the noise in a tournament with identical contestants could lead to an increase in efforts. No intuition is given for this result and, unlike this article, his result does not hinge on differences in the abilities of the contestants. Also, the production function in Nalebuff and Stiglitz (1983) is of the form
yk = ηx k + εk. It is the variance of the common noise variable η (not the variance of the idiosyncratic noise, εk) that accounts for this result. Nalebuff and Stiglitz (1983) also found that an increase in the variance of the common noise could increase welfare.
I became aware of Kräkel’s article after writing this article. Kräkel (2008) proves this result by considering (a) the density of convolutions that are unimodal at zero and are also symmetric around zero, and (b) increasing and strictly convex cost functions. Like this paper, he finds that aggregate effort is increasing in the variance of noise, if the difference in the abilities of the contestants Δ > σ. In spite of Kräkel’s (2008) relatively general formulation, a specific formulation as in this article is necessary because it is important to show that there exists a set of values of σ that satisfies the two restrictions in (9). Although Kräkel (2008) considers an example with an exponential cost function and normally distributed noise, he does undertake the kind of computations in this article to show that there exist values of σ that satisfy the two restrictions in (9). This is because he is interested in an entirely different issue. He obtains the interesting result that, in equilibrium, a high-ability contestant may choose a high variance of noise while a low-ability may choose a low variance of noise.
This is not a general result. It is the consequence of the exponential cost function. For example, if the cost function is quadratic, the ratio of efforts will be constant, so the difference in efforts will widen if both contestants increase their efforts. However, in this case, if one were to use the Gini-coefficient as the measure of competitive balance, then there will be no change in competitive balance as both contestants increase their efforts since the ratio of efforts remains unchanged.
One past American Idol contestant with mediocre singing ability whose popularity hasn’t seemed to have waned is William Hung (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hung). Although, he did not even make it past the audition stage, his popularity soared after his audition was shown on the program. However, in spite of his popularity, it must be noted that he has not won the kind of elite prizes in the music industry like the Grammy awards, multi-platinum selling albums, American Music Awards, Billboard Music Awards, etc. So William Hung’s popularity, based on his non-singing abilities, has not won him the elite prizes in the music industry. In contrast, some of the past top four finalists like Carrie Underwood, Chris Daughtry, Clay Aiken, and Kelly Clarkson have won some of these elite prizes. Contestants like William Hung and Sanjaya Malakar, who are popular for reasons other than their singing ability, do not appear to be the type that the organizers of American Idol are interested in.
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Acknowledgments
My thanks are due to Ed Kutsoati, Qiang Fu, Zane Spindler, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and to Arian Khaleghi for helpful discussions. My thanks are due to SSHRC for their financial support. This paper was previously circulated as CESifo working paper #2171.
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Atsu Amegashie, J. American Idol: should it be a singing contest or a popularity contest?. J Cult Econ 33, 265–277 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-009-9102-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-009-9102-6