Contests With Doping

Abstract

Doping, or the use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs, is an epidemic problem in sports ranging from the Olympics to high school athletics. This article presents a theoretical model of doping use in a contest environment. The authors show that, under fairly general conditions, the minimal frequency of random testing to prevent doping use increases in the number of contestants. The presence of even a small penalty, in addition to expulsion from the contest, makes random testing more effective, especially in large contests. For a given testing frequency, the minimal penalty to prevent doping can be nonmonotonic in the number of contestants.

May Increasing Doping Sanctions Discourage Entry to the Competition?

“…Recall that the competition is modeled as a one-shot game. Although this is quite standard in literature (see, e.g., Berentsen, Bruegger, & Loertscher, 2008; Eber, 2008; Haugen, 2004; Ryvkin, 2013), there are some limitations to this approach. In real world, athletes are more likely to participate in a repeated game (i.e., in several competitions).…”

Sandbagging

“…First, the article theoretically investigates a new kind of counterproductive behavior in contest games. The previous literature has analyzed the possibilities of sabotage (e.g., Chen, 2003;Konrad, 2000;Münster 2007), cheating and doping (e.g., Gilpatric, 2011;Kräkel, 2007;Ryvkin, 2012), and sandbagging as a signal jamming device (e.g., Hörner & Sahuguet, 2007, Münster, 2009 in contests. The current article shows under which conditions sandbagging is used to influence the matching of players in future contests within a dynamic contest game.…”

An Economic Approach to Sports Injury Policies

“…We add to this the stipulation that effort also includes the athlete's willingness to take risks. The next section adopts the standard Tullock contest model to analyze the impact of an injury intervention on athletes’ risk-taking (see also Szymanski, 2003 and Dietl et al, 2009 for sports applications of Tullock models, and Ryvkin (2013) and Mohan and Hazari (2016) for a recent application of a Tullock model with doping).…”