Market Design: sports

Showing posts with label sports. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Drugs in sports

An editorial in The Guardian reminds me of the heyday of bicycle racing.
The Guardian view on drugs in sport: a deep corruption: "A devastating report from a parliamentary select committee shows a culture of studied evasion around the abuse of performance-enhancing substances in professional sport"
...
"Over in the world of professional cycling, Team Sky, founded to “win clean”, turns out to have had a terrible problem with asthma among its athletes. Sir Bradley Wiggins apparently suffered from an asthma that could only be treated with a steroid which has the side-effect of allowing endurance athletes to lose fat rapidly while maintaining muscle mass. This is legal provided a doctor has certified that the drug is needed to treat the asthma. "
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Here's the parliamentary report: Combatting doping in sport

Summary: "There is overwhelming evidence of the widespread use of performance enhancing drugs in sport. Some are illegal in any respect; others are legal, but are used in suspicious ways. Whether permitted for selective use or banned outright, performance enhancing drugs can have serious consequences for the integrity of sport and the wellbeing of individual athletes. The huge increase in financial rewards for successful sports men and women carries the increased risk of incentives to use drugs to cheat. Our long inquiry has relied on detailed oral and written evidence, academic research, investigative journalism, and whistleblowers, to uncover this covert and pervasive activity across different sports. The inquiry studied both agencies responsible for policing the use of performance enhancing drugs, and the programmes that, as our report will demonstrate, have used them in questionable ways. In particular, our inquiry has found acute failures in several different organisations in athletics and cycling: a failure to share appropriate medical records with anti-doping organisations; a failure to keep proper internal records of the medical substances given to athletes; and a failure to outlaw the use of potentially dangerous drugs in certain sports. All of these failures have occurred in an under-resourced national anti-doping infrastructure, which has had neither the financial means nor powers of enforcement. Some steps have been taken to alleviate this context and the failures it has permitted, but these measures have come too late. We call on those bodies identified in this report to pay serious attention to our recommendations; we cannot afford to allow these same failures to happen again."

Monday, January 1, 2018

Is there an equivalence between (not) paying kidney donors and boxers or football players?

Kim Krawiecz makes a point, in several installments:

December 21, 2017
If You Oppose Paying Kidney Donors, You Should Oppose Paying Football Players And Boxers Too
"Having concluded that simply advocating for compensated kidney donation was not sufficiently controversial, Phil Cook and I are now turning our sights on professional sports – specifically, professional football and boxing. In a piece just posted to SSRN, we contrast the compensation ban on organ donation with the legal treatment of football, boxing, and other violent sports in which both acute and chronic injuries to participants are common. While there is some debate about how best to regulate these sports in order to reduce the risks, there appears to be no serious debate about whether participants should be paid. Indeed, for the best adult football players, college scholarships and perhaps a professional contract worth multiple millions are possible."

December 22, 2017
Paying Kidney Donors, Football Players, And Boxers: Medical Risks
"the medical risks to a professional career in football, boxing, and other violent sports are much greater both in the near and long term than the risks of donating a kidney. Injuries in such sports are common, and retired players are very often disabled by the long-term effects of these injuries as well the cumulative effect of thousands of blows to the body."

December 24, 2017
Paying Kidney Donors, Football Players, And Boxers: Informed Consent And It’s Limits
"We believe that if NOTA were amended to allow payments to donors, potential kidney donors could be protected against being unduly tempted through the existing structure of screening, counseling, and delay, perhaps with some additional protections to prevent hasty decisions. On the other hand, it is not clear that NFL recruits have such protections in place.

"Whether and when sane, sober, well-informed, adults should be banned by government authority from choosing to engage in an activity that risks their own life and limb is an ancient point of contention. There are a variety of hazardous activities that are permitted with no legal bar to receiving compensation. Included on this list are such occupations as logging, roofing, commercial fishing, and military service. Also included are violent sports such as football, boxing, and mixed martial arts (MMA). These examples illustrate a broad endorsement of the principle that consenting adults should be allowed to exchange (in a probabilistic sense) their physical health and safety for financial compensation, even in some instances where the ultimate product is simply providing a public entertainment.
...
"In short, to the extent that the ban on compensated kidney donation is grounded in a concern that the lure of money may cause donors to disregard the risks of the procedure and subsequent long-term effects, that concern applies with even more force to participation in violent sport.

"This, of course, is just a taste of our analysis and evidence, so read the full paper* for more."

*If We Allow Football Players and Boxers to Be Paid for Entertaining the Public, Why Don't We Allow Kidney Donors to Be Paid for Saving Lives?
Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 81, No. 3, 2018
and by Philip J. Cook Kimberly D. Krawiec

December 25, 2017
Paying Kidney Donors, Football Players, And Boxers: Exploitation, Race, Class

"We believe that using words like “coercion” and “exploitation” to characterize the introduction of a new option by which poor people (and others) could earn a substantial amount of money provides more heat than light on this situation. The legitimate ethical concern is that so many Americans are poor, with inequality increasing over time. But that observation does not support a ban on compensation, which in fact limits the options available to the poor and thereby makes a bad situation (their lack of marketable assets) worse. But for anyone not persuaded by this argument, we note that these social-justice concerns apply with at least equal force to compensating boxers; most American professional boxers were raised in lower-income neighborhoods, and are either black or Hispanic.
...
"As more has become known about the dangers of the repeated head trauma, similar arguments regarding football have become more prominent. About 70% of NFL players are black, and Pacific Islanders are also overrepresented as compared to the American population. Accordingly, much attention has been paid to the concussion crisis as a race and class problem. As one observer recently noted, “What’s a little permanent brain damage when you’re facing a life of debilitating poverty?” In reality, NFL players are better educated themselves, and come from better educated homes, than is average for Americans, in part because the NFL typically recruits college students. Still, some NFL players, like some would-be kidney donors, come from poverty."

December 26, 2017
If You Oppose Paying Kidney Donors, You Should Oppose Paying Football Players And Boxers Too: Wrap-Up

"In this series of posts, I’ve discussed a new draft that Phil Cook and I are circulating, If We Allow Football Players and Boxers to Be Paid for Entertaining the Public, Why Don't We Allow Kidney Donors to Be Paid for Saving Lives?. Our claim, which I laid out in my first post, is that there is a stronger case for compensating kidney donors than for compensating participants in violent sports. If this proposition is accepted, one implication is that there are only three logically consistent positions: allow compensation for both kidney donation and for violent sports; allow compensation for kidney donation but not for violent sports; or allow compensation for neither. Our current law and practice is perverse in endorsing a fourth regime, allowing compensation for violent sports but not kidney donation.

A common argument in support of the ban on kidney donation is that if people were offered the temptation of substantial compensation, some would volunteer to donate against their own “true” best interests. This argument is often coupled with a social justice concern, namely that if kidney donors were paid, a large percentage of volunteers would be poor and financially stressed, and for them the offer of a substantial financial inducement would be coercive. In sum, a system of compensated donation would provide an undue temptation, and end up exploiting the poor.

To these arguments we offer both a direct response, and a response by analogy with violent sport. My posts have touched on a few key points. First, the medical risks to a professional career in football, boxing, and other violent sports are much greater both in the near and long term than the risks of donating a kidney. On the other hand, the consent and screening process in professional sports is not as developed as in kidney donation. The social justice concerns stem from the fact that most players are black and some come from impoverished backgrounds."

The post goes on to point out that the (life savings) benefits to kidney patients from kidney donation are huge, and it's hard to argue that they are less deserving or get less benefit than sports spectators. But you get the idea...

Monday, October 3, 2016

Unraveling of college sports recruiting--continued

Inside Higher Ed has the story:
Too Young to Commit?
Urging colleges to change a recruiting culture that targets middle schoolers, Ivy League announces proposals for curbing early recruitment of athletes.

"The Ivy League will announce today a series of proposals aimed at curbing early recruiting in college sports, urging other National Collegiate Athletic Association members to “change the culture of recruiting that forces prospective student-athletes to commit earlier and earlier.”

The proposed Division I rule changes, which would potentially be voted on at the NCAA’s annual meeting in January, would prohibit verbal offers from coaches to potential recruits until Sept. 1 of the student’s junior year of high school. The legislation would also prohibit players initiating or receiving phone calls with and from college coaches, and ban any recruiting conversations at camps or clinics until that date.

"Current NCAA Division I rules differ among sports, but they largely already prohibit players from receiving phone calls from a coach, going on official campus visits or getting an offer before their junior or senior year. Prospective athletes are allowed to initiate phone calls with coaches, however, and are allowed to visit campuses and meet with coaches prior to their junior year, as long as the trip is an unofficial visit not paid for by the institution.

...

"Harris pointed to increasing transfer rates in intercollegiate athletics as evidence athletes are making recruitment decisions too early. According to the NCAA, one-third of college athletes transfer to another program.

“There’s a lot of talk about there being a transfer problem,” Harris said. “Well, I would say a lot of the problem with transfers is the fact that we have individuals making decisions too soon that are too rushed.”

Early recruiting is especially prevalent in sports like women’s soccer and lacrosse, where some players are being recruited as early as middle school. An analysis by the New York Times and the National Collegiate Scouting Association in 2014 found that 36 percent of women’s lacrosse players who use the consulting firm to commit to colleges are doing so early, as are 24 percent of women’s soccer players.

The athletes cannot sign binding letters of intent at such an early age, but middle school students are increasingly announcing verbal commitments to specific institutions after receiving unofficial scholarship offers from coaches."

Friday, January 1, 2016

Stanford faculty on Stanford football (while waiting for the Rose Bowl)

Someone at Stanford thought it would be funny to make very short videos of Stanford faculty members saying something non-traditional about football, in the run-up to the Rose Bowl. (I think Hank Greely No 2, who also talks about market design of sorts, is the winner, but maybe I'm the runner-up:)