Chess players’ fame versus their merit

Abstract

We investigate a pool of international chess title holders born between 1901 and 1943. Using Elo ratings, we compute for every player his expected score in a game with a randomly selected player from the pool. We use this figure as the player’s merit. We measure players’ fame as the number of Google hits. The correlation between fame and merit is 0.38. At the same time, the correlation between the logarithm of fame and merit is 0.61. This suggests that fame grows exponentially with merit.

Keywords:

• fame
• achievement
• correlation
• estimation

JEL Classification:

• L83
• D71
• D63
• C13

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the NIH [grant number R01 GM105033-01].