Last week I had a post about “walking” and cricket which suggested that the role of fans in determining the equilibrium choice (“walk” or “don’t walk”) was significantly affected by the attitude of fans. This week’s Economist mentioned an interesting working paper on doping and sport which had some interesting similarities, although I hadn’t read this paper before. In the paper the game is between the athletes, the sports administrators and the fans, and the authors argue there’s a unique equilibrium where the players dope, the sports administrators don’t conduct dope tests and the fans continue to follow the sport. The argument is that if fans were to desert the sport when doping was uncovered, then the sports administrators would have no incentive to test since their sport would be undermined, and so in the absence of testing everyone dopes.
The difference was that in my argument it was the fact that fans didn’t care, or didn’t care enough, that led to the “bad” outcome, whereas in this paper the problem is that the fans do care. Possibly a problem with their paper is that fans can learn about doping even without formal doping tests, and so might desert the sport anyway.
But it raises an interesting question- is a sport damaged when its fans care too little or too much about “doing the right thing”?