Abstract
Anti-doping policies refer to standard economics of crime. This chapter stresses on limited efficiency of current recipes to combat doping derived from the standard theory such as the WADA negative list of performance-enhancing drugs on which are based the punishments of detected doping. Inefficiency starts from testing to sanctioning with an extremely low probability for a doped athlete to be detected, then sanctioned. The negative list is inefficient because it sends wrong incentives to athletes and the pharmaceutical industry, and due to a significant time lag between the emergence of a doping innovation and the capacity to test (control) for the new substance. Anti-doping combat meets institutional weaknesses. Game theory suggests a renewal of anti-doping policies. In this framework is suggested a new series of incentives based on each athlete establishing his/her performance-enhancing drugs diary that transform doping into a self-defeating strategy.
Keywords
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- 1.
Forbidden substances cannot be found in a free market and must be purchased in a shadow (black) market for drugs where prices are several times higher than in a free market for (allowed) pharmaceutical products. Thus an extension of the negative list translates into higher cost.
- 2.
As stated in Andreff et al. (2008), nobody has been able yet to test a relationship between those athletes found positive and the total population of actually doped athletes; nor a relationship between all athletes tested and the real population of those actually doped. Moreover, doping cannot be assumed to have an equal efficiency among the population of those doped athletes.
- 3.
For instance, the Australian Institute for Sport has invested into research with the Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney with a view to identifying performance genes that could boost muscle mass, increase endurance, reduce injury time and even preselect the next generation of elite athletes (Miah 2002).
- 4.
- 5.
This Haugen’s suggestion is half-way towards our new approach (4.2.2) which is not to lower the incentive to dope but to create new rules that transform athletes’ behaviour and choice thanks to an incentive not to dope; thus doping is turned upside down into a self-defeating strategy.
- 6.
Cavagnac (2009) wrote: «Reducing doping can always be obtained by a more repressive policy but the policy may be improved by the very players’ willingness» . This individual and collective willingness (not to dope) is also what our regulation device aims at achieving. Cavagnac then went on in the direction of a more (mathematically) sophisticated solution: inciting athletes to group themselves in stable coalitions of ‘clean’ athletes of a sufficient size in order to reduce the number of doped athletes.
- 7.
Actually, PEDs and medical protocols have more or less generalised during the past two or three decades in all professional sports and in high-level non-professional sports. This is a major consequence of the aforementioned prisoner’s dilemma.
- 8.
This would be a sort of social contagion effect reverse to the one that spreads doping all over the peloton; see Dimant and Deutscher (2014).
- 9.
The probability that riders would adopt such a behaviour equivalent to collective suicide by far is not nil and probably is higher than one can expect, given the results of the surveys reported above (Chapter 3) with samples of adolescent and elite athletes.
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Andreff, W. (2019). Moving Beyond Inefficient Policies to Combat Doping. In: An Economic Roadmap to the Dark Side of Sport. Palgrave Pivots in Sports Economics. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28615-6_4
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