Serial Position Bias Among Experts: Evidence From a Cooking Competition Show

Abstract

The Great British Bake Off is a popular amateur cooking competition show, and its design offers an opportunity for analyzing serial position bias among expert rankings. In this paper, we use the technical challenge portion of the show to assess whether experts—in this case, the judges in the show—are susceptible to primacy or recency effects. We find that expert judges favor the first dish tasted in a blind test and that this pattern holds not only among judges of the British version of the show but also in other English-speaking versions. We do not find evidence of a recency effect. Our results indicate that expert assessments, regularly used in markets, are vulnerable to bias even when there are no financial incentives.