You are playing in you local club golf tournament, getting ready to tee off and there is last-minute addition to the field… Tiger Woods. Will you play better or worse?
The theory of tournaments is an application of game theory used to study how workers respond when you make them compete with one another. Professional sports are ideal natural laboratories where tournament theory can be tested. An intuitive idea is that if two contestants are unequal in ability but the tournament treats them equally, then both contestants should perform poorly (relative to the case when each is competing with a similarly-abled opponent.) The stronger player is very likely to win so the weaker player conserves his effort which in turn enables the stronger player to conserve his effort and still win.
There is a paper by Kellogg professor Jennifer Brown that examines this effect in professional golf tournaments. She compares how the average competitor performs when Tiger Woods is in the tournament relative to when he is not. Controlling for a variety of factors, Tiger Woods’ presence increases (i.e. worsens, remember this is golf) the score of the average golfer, even in the first round of the tournament.
There are actually two reasons why this should be true. First is the direct incentive effect mentioned above. The other is that lesser golfers should take more risks when they are facing tougher competition. Surprisingly, this is not evident in the data. (I take this to be bad news for the theory, but the paper doesn’t draw this conclusion.)
Also, since golf is a competition among many players and there are prizes for second, third etc., the theory does not necessarily imply a Tiger Woods effect. For example, consider the second-best player. For her, what matters is the drop-off in rewards as a player falls from first to second relative to second to third. If the latter is the steeper fall, then Tiger Woods’ presence makes her work harder. Since the paper looks at the average player, then what should matter is something like concavity vs. convexity of the prize schedule.
Also, remember the hypothesis is that both players phone it in. Unfortunately we don’t have a good control for this because we can’t make Tiger Woods play against himself. Perhaps the implied empirical hypothesis says something about the relative variance in the level of play. When Tiger Woods is having a bad season, competition is tighter and that makes him work harder, blunting the effect of the downturn. When he is having a good season, he slacks off again blunting the effect of the boom. By contrast, for the weaker player the incentive effects make his effort pro-cyclical, amplifying temporal variations in ability.
Jonah Lehrer (to whom my fedora is flipped) prefers a psychological explanation.
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November 20, 2009 at 6:54 am
michaelwebster
What about the golfers that play with Tiger? How do they do?
If the paper shows that people try less in the face of daunting competition, his foursome ought to play poorly.
If the paper shows that people choke in the face of daunting competition by overthinking, then his foursome who can simply mimic Tiger’s game out to play better.
November 20, 2009 at 7:15 am
pll
There is a summary article of Jen Brown’s paper in Kellogg Insight:
http://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/index.php/Kellogg/article/golf_lessons
And, there is also a video podcast where she discusses it:
http://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/index.php/Kellogg/content/insight_in_person
November 20, 2009 at 10:17 am
Sean Crockett
If Tiger Woods is playing there are many more eyeballs on the tournament. Perhaps so many potential second-guessers makes the average golfer play more conservatively (he doesn’t want to be “that guy” who triple bogied a hole in front of a big audience). Somewhat analogous reasoning to why NFL coaches are too conservative in “going for it” on fourth down; winning matters, but so does not looking stupid. This audience effect seems to me particularly plausible since there is a Tiger Woods effect even in the first round of a tournament. Are there untelevised tournaments to test whether it is a Tiger Woods effect or a Tiger Woods Audience effect?
November 30, 2009 at 3:53 am
Trophies and Medals
I would imagine it would depend on personality type- some people would be defeatist and give up when faced with such competition whereas in others it would bring out the competitive streak and spur them to try harder.
January 26, 2010 at 2:22 pm
The Tiger Woods Effect Updated « Cheap Talk
[…] it may be a boon to academia. I previously blogged about Jen Brown’s research on “The Tiger Woods” effect as evidence of strategic […]
January 18, 2012 at 1:07 am
Are Other Animals Strategic? Are Humans? « Cheap Talk
[…] I write all the time about strategic behavior in athletic competitions. A racer who is behind can be expected to ease off and conserve on effort since effort is less likely to pay off at the margin. Hence so will the racer who is ahead, etc. There is evidence that professional golfers exhibit such strategic behavior, this is the Tiger Woods effect. […]
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