Game Theory in Athletic Doping
“Sportsmen who take drugs may be prisoners of a different game” writes The Economist. This “different game” alludes to the prisoner’s dilemma, a concept explored in Game Theory. Prisoner’s dilemma is explained as the following: when two prisoners are placed in a situation where they both have to simultaneously choose one of two options, to confess or to not confess. Their respective outcomes are directly related to their choices. But, how does this connect to sportsmen? In this case, athletes are presented with two different options, to dope or not to dope. This confliction can be analyzed using Game Theory. Suppose we have two athletes, athlete A and athlete B. Both have choices to dope or to stay clean. In each scenario, the athlete that dopes is guaranteed better results compared to the athlete that does not. First, we should look at athlete B. In B’s scenario, if athlete A does not dope, it is in B’s best interest to dope so that he is guaranteed an advantage. On the other hand, if A dopes, then B must dope, else A is guaranteed to win. Now, if we look at athlete A, he faces the exact same scenario. If B does not dope, it is in A’s best interest to dope so that he has an advantage. If B does dope, A must dope as well. Therefore, both players have a dominant strategy of doping. Furthermore, the Nash Equilibrium becomes doping for both athletes.
This binary example explains why, to some degree, athletes dope: to stay ahead of the game. Although it is evident that doping is the dominant strategy, shouldn’t there be a way to eliminate the need for doping? Some would offer the suggestion of an inspector, someone would test each athlete to ensure that there existed no doping. However, contrary to belief, an inspector would not ameliorate the situation. According to the Economist, there are incentives for the inspector. These include, “the cost,” “the disruption it causes to the already complicated lives of the athletes,” and the “fear of how customers would react if more thorough testing did reveal near-universal cheating” (The Economist). Thus, the best situation is to test on occasion, only exposing certain individuals at a time rather than the whole barrel of bad apples (The Economist). Another method to approaching this, based on math, is to report all tests, positive or negative. This would help familiarize customers with the extent to which testing was done and how widespread doping is (The Economist). This would allow for athletes to break through the prisoner’s dilemma and wipe clean the floor of dopers. Although far from reality, there does exist a possible solution to this unethical practice, and hopefully, society will allow this remedy to come to fruition so that we can observe the true extent to pure human athleticism.
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21581978-sportsmen-who-take-drugs-may-be-prisoners-different-game-athletes-dilemma