Doping: Never-ending story? Never-ending glory?

0:00Good afternoon. Thank you very much for inviting me here to Auburn. The topic I'm talking about is doping, never-ending story, never-ending glory. And this is a picture you can see. Perhaps, have a closer look to the facial features and to the five o'clock shadow. It's not me with hairs. It's a girl. That's Tammy Thomas and she's a track cyclist and She won silver in 2001, and she used anabolic steroids a little bit too much, as you can see.

0:56And she was banned from cycling for life in 2002. So, this is what I want to talk about. Doping. I have a very preliminary definition of doping here. is methods to improve the performance of an athlete, which are critical from a sport ethical point of view. So the main focus is on improving the performance and the second focus is on critical from an ethical point of view. So let us be clear, we cannot define doping very well, but let's go with that.

1:42So if you look to the scandals, we have a lot of scandals here around. We have anabolic steroids, we have APO or THG, and there is an advance fighting against doping. So there is a Lausanne Declaration on doping in sports, there is a foundation of the USADA in 2002. So there are a lot of institutions who fight against doping. On the other side, if we look to the empirical evidence and to the tests, so we had in 2011 we had 243,000 tests and only 2,800 positive results. That means there are 1.2% positive results, which is very, very few.

2:35A colleague of mine, who had done research with a special method to find out how many people, how many athletes are doping, found out that there are more than 30% of all professional athletes are doping. So the tests do not show the reality. So, what I want to talk about is, why does doping occur in elite sports? That's the first question. And the second question is, should doping be banned by the government? So, this is more interesting from an Austrian point of view. Yeah, should there be a governmental and Financial Intervention at all.

3:26So this is the content. First, I've talked about the problem. Then I will have a closer look to the explanation, which is a little bit mathematical, but not too much. So it's based on game theory. And then the third question here, should doping be banned by the government? And then some results. So, if we look to a game theory theoretical explanation, let's assume, okay, you know economics always assume, so there are some assumptions, there are two athletes and they are meeting in a simultaneously competition in an individual sport, like running or something like that, or sprint, and there should be no penalty carrying doping ban, so there is There is no ban against doping, so they meet in a contest and they have two strategies they can dope or they can avoid doping.

4:29So what are the determinants for their decision? There are three points. First, the probability to win depends on their own strategy and the strategy of the competitor and the performance, their own performance in relation to the performance of the competitor. And there is some accidental variable in this stuff as well. One are benefits of the victory, like material benefits, there is a prize money, and there are non-material benefits like prestige or fame and honor. And on the other side there are costs of doping, like material costs, there are procurement costs or non-material costs like moral scruples and so on.

5:19So these are determinants, and if we look a little bit to the decision-making process, The net benefit of an athlete is the probability to win, multiplied by the benefit of winning, minus the cost of doping, if he uses doping methods. So these costs are zero, if he doesn't use doping, if he uses doping methods they are greater than zero. Doping is a dominant strategy if the net benefit of non-doping is less than the benefit of doping. This is the payoff matrix. We don't need that. Let's go to the determinants.

6:13The first thing must be clear. If doping leads to better performance, then this is fulfilled. The probability of winning with doping is greater than the probability of winning without doping. The first thing is true. If we look to the benefits of victory, we have a very high price money. So, there is an example, Australian Open Tennis, 30 million Australian dollars, so this is very huge. And the non-material benefits are also very huge. So on the material side and on the non-material side of the benefits, we have very huge extended.

6:59And if you look to the costs, so athletes do neglect the effects on the health status. So the health risks are totally underestimated. There are several tests like the Goldman test and so on. They are underestimated. And on the other side, the procurement costs are very low. If you look to this EPO injection, you can buy this for less than $10. So that's very cheap. So the result is that doping is a dominant strategy. This is the result. If If we go a little bit further and ask if there is a super game strategy, so if we repeat one game and we have more games, there could be interest of the elites in making a collusion like they talk to each other and try to avoid doping.

7:57And therefore there should be some preconditions fulfilled like identical rivals, low preference for the Present, and then the athletes should think that games are repeated so often so that they are not ending and that defection can be detected, so doping can be detected exposed. So what we can find out is these preconditions are not fulfilled. So there There are constantly new rivals. There is a very high preference for the present. The length of the career is limited, three years, perhaps a little bit more, perhaps less. And defection cannot be detected, exposed without a costly test. So you have to run tests to find out whether doping is here or not. So there is no super game strategy. That's the What is the result of that? So what is the result of all? Obviously, there is no inherent solution for this doping phenomena.

9:05That is the first point. Without anti-doping instruments, doping would occur widespread. That is the next point. And the third point is, avoiding doping requires an external institution using anti-doping instruments. So that is the result of the game theoretical analysis. Let's go a further step. Should doping be banned by the government? That's the next step. As you have seen, this is a prisoner dilemma situation, but a cartel is also a prisoner dilemma situation. So there is not necessarily a need for a governmental intervention. If we look to the governmental intervention, we can see that the governmental interventions are usually justified by the negative effects on sports.

9:59So doping has negative effects on sports. It affects the contest fairness, the athlete's health status, the market for sports, the social capital, and so on. So they say doping affects all this stuff. Let's have a closer look to the contest's fairness. So it means the contest is not fair anymore if doping is allowed. But is this true? So they define fairness as a state of equal opportunity from the beginning, from the start. So at the start there should be equal opportunities. But you have different physical constitutions, that's the first thing. And you have different training methods. What does it mean? It means if you go against doping, you have to equalize the physical constitution as well, or the training methods. So does it mean you have to introduce something like a bonus for worse First at least, or a handicap for better at least, that is the first thing.

11:08And the next thing is, allowing doping would enhance the fairness. For a simple reason, because nowadays these guys have the possibility to dope who uses doping methods which could be camouflaged very well. So if you allow doping for all people, it would be a leveling of the playing field. So that's the reason. So let's have a closer look to that. I've chosen Hayek 1, the older Hayek, not the evolution of rules and stuff. I want to stick to the old Hayek and the old Hayek says that there must be a set of rules with these characteristics, which guarantees a maximum of individual freedom, and this individual freedom has to be guaranteed to all individuals.

12:09So that's the older Hayek. And he says these rules have to be universal, open, abstract, etc., etc. Let's go to the first thing, universality. What does universality mean? It means that there must be indifference between the individuals. How they are treated by law, that's the first thing. A law must apply to everybody regardless of his individual attributes. And it may not be exclusively applicable to certain person or groups. That's what Hayek says. And there are some other features, temporal concretization, local indifference and so on, that's not important for us right now. The first thing is important, the indifference between individuals. And the next thing is, the individuals, the result of these individuals interacting together based on this set of rules, this result is uncertain.

13:04So it's open. We cannot define it by itself. So what does it mean? It means the following. All these arguments I've showed before are based on an idea of an optimal outcome. Sports has to deliver this outcome. So that's the first thing, which is not true. The second thing is, each anti-doping intervention means that athletes are treated differently from us. So if we go as a professor and I take tranquilizers or anabolic steroids, there is no harm, there is no ban, but if an athlete does so, he has a problem. So what does it mean?

13:50A governmental anti-doping intervention does not fulfill the Hayekian criteria. So therefore, from this point of view, there is no need for a governmental intervention. So my results, as we have seen, doping occurs in elite sports due to the given setting and anti-doping intervention provided by the government cannot be justified on this basis. And the third thing is, of course, clubs, organizers of sports events or contests or leagues can use doping methods on their own because then there would be no discrimination and Decent. Thank you very much.