[We would like to thank Paul Jakus (@paulj) of the Dept. of Applied Economics at Utah State University for this summary of research presented at the 2024 Phish Studies Conference. -Ed.]

The first two blogposts in this series can be found here and here. This post will address the statistical biases believed to be present in the data, and how anomalous raters may contribute to bias.

Statistically, a show rating represents our best point estimate of an unobservable theoretical construct: the “true” show rating. To the degree that an estimated show rating deviates from its true value, the error is composed of sampling variance and bias. In the figure below, think of the bullseye as the true show rating, and the red dots as our estimates (best guesses) of the true value.

Read more...