The Economics of Sport
  • Sports Economics
  • About
  • Workshop
  • Media
  • Selected Publications
  • Book Reviews
  • A Primer on Gaelic Games
  • Upcoming Events
  • Education
  • Resources & Links
  • Data

Too Few Vaccines, Too Much Diving

5/8/2021

 
By John Considine
Picture
One of the most enjoyable workshops that I have attended was on the subject of coaching games.  As an introduction to the topic of defending, the speaker played a short video (here).  It was designed to show that patience plays a large part in the art of defending.  Sometimes inaction can be better than action.  At around the same time, the sport psychologist Michael Bar-Eli was making a similar point in the Journal of Economic Psychology.  Bar-Eli's paper examines data on penalty kicks and he suggests that goalkeepers would save more penalties by diving less.

Bar-Eli documents the background to this research in his 2018 book called Boost! How the psychology of sports can enhance your performance in management and work.  After getting a Professorship in Ben-Gurion University, the Dean introduced Bar-Eli to Ilana Ritov.  Ritov's research examined "inaction bias" in vaccinations.  Too few people were getting vaccinated.  After reading her research, Bar-Eli considered if the opposite bias might explain the behaviour of goalkeepers in penalty kicks.  In the case of goalkeepers, he suspected that the bias was towards action rather than inaction.  Ilena Ritov joined Bar-Eli and the result was the Journal of Economic Psychology paper showing an action bias.  Goalkeepers could learn from the lion in the video above.

Bar-Eli and his coauthors explained their findings by reference to a paper by Daniel Kahneman and Dale Miller dealing with norm theory.  An economist might have noted the similarities with elements of Chapter 12 from The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.  This is the chapter where John Maynard Keynes discusses animal spirits - "a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction".  A quote from the chapter can be used to capture the explanation offered by Bar-Eli and his colleagues - "Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally".  The norm is for keepers to dive.  The reputation of a goalkeeper who does not dive might suffer.

I was not surprised to read that the Journal of Economic Psychology paper was "chosen by the New York Times Magazine as one of the significant highlights and most innovative research breakthroughs of 2008".  I would recommend it because of the way the differences between the results and previous literature are clearly explained.  Economists like Steven Levitt and Ignacio Palacios-Huerta had separately shown that penalty kickers and goalkeepers followed an optimal minimax strategy.  Bar-Eli's paper is a model of clarity in explaining the apparent contradictions.

The year 2008 was at the start of the Great Recession. I smiled when I read a paragraph in the paper that explained the importance of understanding these biases for economics.  It says that such an understanding is importance to investors and governments.  Seventy years earlier, in his attempt to explain the Great Depression, Keynes did something similar in Chapter 12 from The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.  At the start of the chapter he identified the need for data when he said "Our conclusions must depend upon the actual observation of markets and business psychology".  He did not include observations of sports events.  It was a period before big data and data analytics.  However, his illustrative examples did consider the psychology of parlor games, such as card games and musical chairs.  These were the games used by the mathematician John von Neumann to illustrate the minimax theorem he proved in 1928 - the same minimax theorem that economists like Levitt and Palacios-Huerta use on penalty kick in the 21st century.

It is not hard to imagine Keynes using the action bias in goalkeepers to explain the investor behaviour that contributed to the Great Depression.  To take another quote from Chapter 12, he said these psychological "considerations should not lie beyond the purview of the economist".


Comments are closed.

    Archives

    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013

    About

    This website was founded in July 2013.

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    American Football
    Athletics
    Baseball
    Basketball
    Behavioural Economics
    Boxing
    Broadcasting
    Competitive Balance
    Cricket
    Cycling
    Darts
    David Butler
    Declan Jordan
    Drugs
    Ed Valentine
    Epl
    Esports
    Expenditure
    F1
    Fifa World Cup
    Finances
    Funding
    Gaa
    Gaelic Games
    Gambling
    Game Theory
    Gary Burns
    Geography
    Golf
    Greyhound Racing
    Guest Posts
    Horse Racing
    Impact Studies
    John Considine
    John Eakins
    League Of Ireland
    Location
    Media
    Mls
    Mma
    Olympics
    Participation
    Paul O'Sullivan
    Premier League
    Regulation
    Research
    Robbie Butler
    Rugby
    Simpsonomics
    Snooker
    Soccer
    Spatial Analysis
    Sporting Bodies
    Stephen Brosnan
    Swimming
    Taxation
    Teaching
    Technology
    Tennis
    Transfers
    Uefa
    Ufc
    World Cup
    Wwe

Related

The website is not formally affiliated to any institution and all of the entries represent the personal views and opinions of an individual contributor. The website operates on a not-for-profit basis. For this reason we decline all advertisement opportunities. 

Contact

To contact us email sportseconomics2013@gmail.com or find us on Twitter @SportEcon.