Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
成绩具有绝对意义吗？多数判断实验
Do grades have absolute meaning? An experiment on majority judgment
摘要
Whether in education, performance reviews, or elections, grades serve as tools for assessment, yet the universality of their meanings remains an open question. When voting under majority judgment, voters assign verbal grades such as “excellent, very good, good, fairly good, acceptable, insufficient, to reject” to each candidate. The meaning of these grades should be clear and consistent across all voters. Balinski and Laraki (2011) describe this as a “common language” and claim that the grade labels convey absolute meaning. This paper tests the assumption of absolute meaning by examining whether the meaning of a grade depends on the grading scale (i.e., framing effect) in a political context. We conducted an online experiment (N = 1955) in which participants voted for candidates to the French presidential elections under majority judgment with grading scales with different numbers of grades. Our findings indicate that the grade distributions obtained by candidates are significantly influenced by the grading scales available to voters. Our data therefore rejects the assertion that grades convey absolute meaning, showing instead that their interpretation depends on the number of grades available.
中文摘要
无论是在教育、绩效评估还是选举中，评分都作为评估工具，但其含义的普遍性仍是一个未解之谜。在多数判断投票制下，选民对每位候选人给予诸如“优秀、很好、好、较好、可接受、不足、拒绝”等口头评分。这些评分的含义应当对所有选民清晰且一致。巴林斯基和拉拉基（2011）将此描述为“共同语言”，并声称评分标签传达了绝对意义。本文通过考察在政治情境下，评分的含义是否依赖于评分量表（即框架效应），来检验绝对意义的假设。我们进行了一项在线实验（N=1955），参与者使用不同评分等级数量的评分量表，在多数判断规则下对法国总统选举候选人进行投票。研究结果显示，候选人获得的评分分布显著受到选民可用的评分量表影响。因此，我们的数据否定了评分传达绝对意义的论断，表明其解释依赖于可用评分的数量。