Racers’ attractive looks, popularity, and performance: how do speedboat racers react to fans’ expectations?

Abstract

Using a large sample of individual-level records in Japan speedboat racing where men and women racers participate, we investigated how racers’ performance meets fans’ pre-race expectations. To control for endogeneity bias, we measured the order of racers’ attractiveness randomly determined in each race and then used this order as instrument for measuring racers’ popularity. The fixed-effects IV estimations revealed the following. (1) Racers who are more attractive than their competitors tend to be more popular even after controlling for the condition of the race, racer ability, and other characteristics. (2) More popular men show better performance in the race even if the reward does not vary according to popularity; such tendency is not observed for women. This study contributes a novel setting for determining the expectation-enhancing effects of physical attractiveness.

Attractive or Aggressive? A Face Recognition and Machine Learning Approach for Estimating Returns to Visual Appearance

“…Yamamura et al (2020) used direct evaluations of men and women Japanese speedboat racers’ attractiveness to analyze the performance of these athletes. The attractiveness evaluations came from student recruits.…”

“…This literature includes a number of papers using data from sports, primarily focused on the impact of attractiveness on the earnings of professional athletes (Berri et al, 2011; Ahn & Lee, 2014; Bakkenbüll & Kiefer, 2015; Dietl et al, 2020; Yamamura et al, 2020). Research on the beauty premium among professional athletes faces an important challenge: athletes evaluated in terms of attractiveness are famous and successful and human evaluators may conflate success and fame with beauty, generating biased attractiveness measures.…”

“Beauty too rich for use”: Billionaires’ assets and attractiveness

“…Beauty has been shown to improve success in the labor market and in other endeavors in a large variety of occupations, many of which involve populations of highly paid people. Citing only fairly recent studies, these include academics (Babin et al, 2020); celebrities (Gergaud et al, 2012); corporate directors (Geiler et al, 2018); economists (Hale et al, 2021); women professional golfers (Ahn and Lee, 2014); political candidates (Benjamin and Shapiro, 2009;King and Leigh, 2009; Jones and Price, 2017); regional political leaders (Ling et al, 2019); prostitutes (Arunachalam and Shah, 2012); NFL quarterbacks (Berri et al, 2011); professional speedboat racers (Yamamura et al, 2021), and professional tennis players (Bakkenbüll and Kiefer, 2015). With beauty clearly important in so many different areas, why do we find that among billionaires, financial assets are essentially unrelated to beauty?…”