NobodyÂ’s Innocent

[mrhender]

Nobody’s Innocent

Nobody’s Innocent – The Role of Customers in the
Doping Dilemma

http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/44627/1/MPRA_paper_44627.pdf


Interesting mathematical approach.. Slightly controversial though.


Maybe posted here before but can't find it though.

Abstract:

To which extent high performances in professional sports are based on the use of illicit substances or other doping practices is extremely difficult to measure empirically.
Game-theoretical approaches predict strong incentives to dope based on the interaction among athletes (prisoner’s dilemma)
or the interaction between some control organization and the athletes (inspection game).
The role of stakeholders such as customers, sponsors, and the media is either ignored or only informally discussed.
One might think that customers who are ready to withdraw their support after a doping scandal, would reduce the incentives to dope.
We explicitly model the strategic interaction of such customers with athletes and organizers and strongly refute this (optimistic) conjecture.
Customers even trigger doping by putting a threat on the organizers not to conduct serious doping tests.
However, we show that this result can be altered by a change in the information structure.
If transparency about doping tests is established, then there is a doping-free equilibrium.
This has practical implications for the design of anti-doping policies, as well as for other situations of fraudulent activities.

 

[the sceptic]

Customers threatening to remove their support doesnt reduce the incentive to dope. It increases the incentive for better PR campaigns.

 

[mrhender]

Customers threatening to remove their support doesnt reduce the incentive to dope. It increases the incentive for better PR campaigns.

Fair argument....

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Detecting norm violations would also undermine the reputation of the company itself.Customers who react with a boycott substantially increase the loss of the company and thereby undermine its incentives to uncover (potential) scandals. When the company (Organizer) prefers not to investigate potential fraud, the number of fraudulent activities might even increase. As our model shows, this outcome can be altered if customers are informed about control activities of all companies by some independent institution. Thus, transparency is necessary in order to overcome this type of social dilemma.

Think Germany...

Let us now assume preferences for the Customers that induce uniqueness of a doping-free equilibrium, even if these assumptions might be counterfactual. Suppose that d-n-l Cus d-n-s and c-n-l Cus c-n-s, i.e. Customers preferred to withdraw their support if there are no doping tests. This is in contradiction to Assumptions A1. Let us change A1 to A1’ such that these two orderings have changed, while all other binary comparisons are left unchanged. This change of preference reflects that Customers are now more skeptical about doping practices and therefore now insists on the proof of clean sports in order to stay a supporter. The change in preferences is strong enough to rule out all doping equilibria as the following proposition shows.

An example could be clean protocol in some form

The charter strongly requests that the organization responsible for doping tests becomes independent and thus indirectly accuses the current institution as not being so. The charter expresses this as a principle to create doping-free cycling in the future: “The responsibility for deciding who is tested, when they are tested, and what drugs they are tested for, must reside in an independent entity that is beyond the control of the UCI.
Thus, even in cycling, where there is a long list of detected dopers, it seems that the probability of being detected when doped is not that high.
We argue that in any discipline there are incentives to put insufficient effort into the detection of dopers. In the light of our results, the few spectacular cases of convicted dopers are not delinquent exceptions (bad apples), but rather unlucky cheaters or scapegoats.

I like the sceptical approach..

One type of actors who is in principle capable of establishing transparency are sports associations who we study as Organizers in our model. However, as argued above, such organizations lack incentives to do so. As Dilger and Tolsdorf (2004) and Striegel et al. (2010) even assume their lack of compliance is one reason why data on doping is so limited. In order to achieve more transparency, the WADA could open the access to their database called ADAMS

Party in The Clinic

 

[DirtyWorks]

Unfortunately, the researcher does not understand that WADA has no authority to permit access to data.

It's up to the individual sports federations. Or, the IOC could force it on the sports, but, they are as enthusiastic about hiding doping as the UCI or IAAF.

In principle, transparency is the right idea. And, BTW, the IOC knew exactly what they were doing when they manufactured WADA and related processes. Additionally, the system does assist the sports in protecting athletes from killing themselves. But, that's secondary to hiding doping.

 

[mrhender]

Unfortunately, the researcher does not understand that WADA has no authority to permit access to data.

It's up to the individual sports federations. Or, the IOC could force it on the sports, but, they are as enthusiastic about hiding doping as the UCI or IAAF.

In principle, transparency is the right idea. And, BTW, the IOC knew exactly what they were doing when they manufactured WADA and related processes. Additionally, the system does assist the sports in protecting athletes from killing themselves. But, that's secondary to hiding doping.

They follow it up with this:

Currently only certain actors of the immediate sports environment are allowed to use ADAMS.
Opening the access to ADAMS seems to be a cheap way to establish transparency, while such a policy might involve several new issues, including the violation of privacy rights.
Moreover, it can be difficult or costly to understand and interpret the data for Customers.
A much simpler suggestion is that the WADA makes public to which extent sports associations and NADAs comply to their fight against doping.
This could be a simple rating which gives Customers a clear signal about which disciplines and events are credible in their fight against doping.
Of course, this requires independence on part of the WADA, which is also doubted (Eber, 2002; Preston and Szymanski, 2003), but, in principle, we conclude that there should be an independent rating or certifying agency that officially measures to which extent certain sports events have implemented an anti-doping regime.

As I see it they are considering options..
I don't think they deliberately are ignoring potential issues.
They say that a different approach might be better, thus no reason for them to go into further detail to the ADAMS idea... (apart from what they already did)
And even if they did not know I would forgive that, due to the overall quality and effort of the study...
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I think their overall approach in general is very well-thought-out:

Customers who are ready to leave after a doping scandal, undermine the organizers’ incentives to test athletes on performance-enhancing drugs and to convict them on doping.
As a consequence, athletes have stronger incentives to dope although this need not be in the best interest of any of the three types of players.
Our analysis substantially strengthens the argument already outlined by Eber (2002) who comes to the following conclusion:
The institution responsible for doping controls “may have some temptations to slacken its antidoping effort when confronted with doping affairs to pre- serve the economic value of the shows (e.g., the Olympic Games organized by the IOC [International Olympic Committee]).
Knowing that, athletes may rationally not believe in strong antidoping policies and may then continue to choose high levels of doping.”

This kind of reasoning is very close to my personal perception of the
"grand scheme of things"..

What are your thoughts on the study as a whole?

 

[More Strides than Rides]

I didn't look at the specifics of the study, but it is something I've been feeling for a while.

I avoid brands tied to questionable (meaning: I know they're doping but they haven't been formally sentenced). I wish others would too, but its a hard fight to win. One, doping is so pervasive, its hard to get any gear without a company having had a dodgy decision in the past, or present.

I want to be better at holding a higher stand for my purchases' manufacturers' integrity. But, its hard. Same thing as buying locally grown produce or organic foods; sometimes you have no choice.

I do think everyone needs to be more aware. A good topic to discuss, but its hard to take it much further than a discussion.