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Old 10-08-2009, 07:51 PM   #1 (permalink)
Jinn
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Location: Seattle, WA
You're the keeper of scores in a competition, and you award the wrong person..

Recently there was a competition here in town for a car club for 'best in class', and the award was given to the totally wrong person based on a math error on the part of the meet organizer.

She chose to retroactively withdraw the award from the 'winner' and assign it to the actual winner almost two weeks after the event. There was no prize, so this was really just a 'bragging rights' kind of thing. I didn't personally know either driver, so it really doesn't affect me at all, but it occurred to me that I wouldn't really know what to do in her situation. One one hand, I'd really hate to take a winner spot away from someone who wasn't the winner (nothing feels worse than realizing you've celebrated winning erroneously) but on the other hand I'd feel bad for the person who actually won but felt bad that they hadn't.

I'm not sure if having a prize amount would change my decision.

I think I would ultimately have to correct my error, but boy would I feel terrible about it.

What would you do? Would it matter if there was a substantial prize as a result of winning?
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