Modelling drug taking in sport

Thesis

This thesis considers optimal policies in response to doping in sport. Doping is an area of increasing public concern as growing numbers of athletes, and the organisations responsible for testing them, are implicated in doping scandals. These scandals affect not only those interested in sport, but also society as a whole since athletes are role models. Consequently it is important to consider optimal responses to doping.

The second chapter considers the optimal ban for a welfare maximising anti-doping agency (ADA) to impose on an athlete who tests positive for performance enhancing drugs. Previous authors have assumed that maximal deterrence is optimal, but this chapter shows that when the form of the punishment is a ban from competition, maximal deterrence may no longer be optimal. The optimal punishment is found to depend on factors such as the prevalence of doping and the variance of earnings.

The third chapter examines situations in which ADAs may not wish to uncover doping. In this case, if consumers cannot observe the frequency with which athletes are tested, a no-cheating equilibrium does not exist. I find two mechanisms which can lead to a nocheating equilibrium: consumers who can observe the frequency of testing and an external testing agency, such as WADA, which can retest athletes and punish the ADA if it failed to detect doping.

The final chapter examines whether increasing the frequency of testing deters athletes from doping. Since data is not available to analyse this problem directly, I use the relationship between testing and Olympic performance to infer the relationship between testing and doping. The results suggest that while in some sports, such as athletics, carrying out more tests does deter athletes from taking drugs, in others, such as cycling, there is no evidence of a negative relationship between testing and doping.

Authors: Baudouin, C

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford