Antidoping work consumes huge economic resources. Formal understanding of economic forces that drive athletes to use drugs is lacking. Consequently, work on this phenomenon may be of interest to the sports community, especially the antidoping community. This study uses simple game theory to analyze simple two-player games representing various situations of sports activity. The basic findings are the existence of Nash equilibria forcing agents to use drugs that are very often of the prisoner’s dilemma type, and antidoping work with small or no effects may hence lead to Pareto-worsened situations. This study also shows that antidoping activity should be differentiated between sports activities. Finally, somediscussions on alternative regulatory policies conclude that improved testing may not be the most efficient way to fight doping—if the fight against doping is as important as sports officials like to tell us.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This article addresses effects caused by the transition from a 2-1-0 to a 3-1-0 award system in soccer. The first part of the article discusses consequences of the transition on offensive versus defensive play. This part may be seen as a valuable supplement to work by Brocas and Carrillo (2004) as the choice of a different game theoretic framework provides increased insight into the concept offensive/defensive play in soccer. The second and main part of the paper addresses additional effects induced by the award system transition, especially effects on competitive imbalance. It is shown by simple game theory that under a relatively general set of team descriptions, such a transition may affect competitive balance adversely. In the final sections of the paper some empirical examples strengthen the hypothesis on adverse competitive effects.