Differences between jurors in classical music competitions: the MCDM and Network Theory approaches

This paper analyses the voting in two of the major international classical music competitions, which were held recently, viz. the International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition and the International Chopin Piano Competition, as well as the hypothesis, raised in some media reports, that there were juror cliques in the Wieniawski Competition. Network theory is used to compare the rankings of the two Chopin competitions. Jurors are nodes and they are linked if the correlation between the ordered list of competitors, as measured by the Kendall rank correlation coefficient, exceeds a given threshold value. The obtained networks were found linked in the case of the Chopin Competition, but disconnected in the case of the Wieniawski Competition. The results indicate that there may have been cliques in the Wieniawski Competition, but not in the Chopin Competition. The problem can be descibed in MCDM terminology by labelling the contestants ’variants’ and the jurors (or, more precisely, their musical preferences) – ’criteria’. The similarity of any two criteria is measured by correlating the orders of the alternatives (i.e. variants) that * SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Economics, Warsaw, Poland, e-mail: honorata@sgh.waw.pl, ORCID: 0000-0001-8249-2368. ** SGHWarsaw School of Economics, Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Economics, Warsaw, Poland, e-mail: pzawis@sgh.waw.pl, ORCID: 0000-0002-5297-7644. 94 H. Sosnowska, P. Zawiślak result from applying them. The problem of juror cliques is thereby transformed into one of finding groups of criteria that are similar in the case of these variants.