- Facebook’s business problem is that it is the social network of people you see in real life. All the really interesting stuff you want to do and say on the internet is stuff you’d rather not share with those people or even let them know you are doing/saying.
- What is the rationale for offsides in soccer that doesn’t also apply to basketball?
- If the editors of all the journals were somehow agreeing to publish each others’ papers what patterns would we look for in the data to detect that?
- I need to know in advance the topic of the next 3 Gerzensee conferences so that I can start now writing papers on those topics in hopes of getting invited.
Cheap Talk
A blog about economics, politics and the random interests of forty-something professors
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October 2, 2013 at 3:00 am
Gavin
Re 2: Given the nature of of scoring in soccer, the value of one successful shot far exceeds the value in basketball. The same offside rationale can be applied to almost any field sport with high value, low scoring outcomes
October 2, 2013 at 3:50 am
Taips
Re 2: There are two rationales for offsides:
a) set plays, in which most players & the ball are in the defense’s territory (differences are subtle)
b) fastbreaks (the big one regarding offsides)
b) In basketball, imagine leaving a player under the opposing team’s basket while defending 4 vs 5. If the opponent didn’t adjust you would get an easy 2 pts sometimes, but defending 4 on 5 is a killer, while opponents can come back fast b/c the pitch is relatively small (guards can bail when the shot is in the air and be there to defend the lone striker). This tactic is legal but not use, hence by the weak axiom of revealed stupidity, a “blatant offside” rule would leave BBall unaffected.
Soccer is different, you can defend with one fewer, as evidenced by the fact that red cards don’t kill your team the way they would in BBall. And an extra striker would force the defense down. Either only one player, but a soccer one-on-one w the last defender is still a very good opportunity by soccer offense standards, or a player and some help, then you have created a strong numerical advantage out of nowhere.
Either way, it creates huge gaps in a -already rather large- pitch, and that would make for a very different flow.
a) On set plays, the difference is more subtle, and it is hard to characterise a counterfactual “soccer w/o offsides”.
In pick-up games w/o offsides though, the main difference is that the defense has to stay low so either the whole team defends very low (BBall style) or they leave big vertical gaps in the midfield.
c) Prediction: BBall with offsides and a backcourt violation rule = half-line press defense (=über tedious)
October 2, 2013 at 8:03 am
Andy
Gerzensee conference link is broken
October 2, 2013 at 2:20 pm
Frank
This is what google found me for it:
http://www.szgerzensee.ch/research/conferences/esset-essfm-essim/
October 2, 2013 at 9:47 am
Martin
@Taips, you are right but I think only b) really applies. The true rationale is to avoid having one or two players “wait for the ball” deep in enemy territory. Even in pick-up games without offside rule that is a tactic that is generally despised by the players. In basketball indeed that doesn’t work, because you just can’t miss that player in defense.
a) is just a consequence of having an offside rule. It provides strategic choices to the defending team, which the attacking team has its counter strategies for. Without an offside rule, set pieces would become more like corner kicks all the time.
October 7, 2013 at 4:16 am
Taips
We are in agreement. b) is the biggie, and indeed the analogy of corner kicks is a good one.
Here’s a thought I’d like some data on.
I play pick-up games with a very eclectic & international crowd and blatant offsides are frowned upon in an assymetrical manner. Typically, the subsaharan Africa players find it fair game / “if it bothers you, just cover me” rationale) while the Euros & South-Am treat it as ungentlemanly and cheap.
My natural assumption has to do with the background in organised soccer. I played sweeper for many years and getting the whole defense to come out after a corner kick is second nature to me, even though it’s counterproductive in pickup. So in my view, lurking offsides is cheap b/c it exploits a deeply ingrained tendency.
Do you have further data points or opinions thereupon?
October 2, 2013 at 2:33 pm
Frank
3. I guess I’d find several “duties”, X, that folks might accept as less costly than taking on an editorial role (departmental committees? associate editor positions?). Let Y = becoming a editor. See if E(pubs|Y) > E(pubs|X), despite the fact that more research time is being taken up (controlling for publication record and years in academia, where publications are weighted by journal impact or something…). Of course, one could argue that being an editor just teaches you how to get things published. To deal with that, maybe you would need to look at people taking on their second editorial role.
Or, if it was different subsets of journals in each generation of editors colluding based on friendships, then you could compare cross-pub clusters at a decade or two apart (e.g., to see that QJE and AER are tight in the 90s; but QJE got with JPE in the 00s).