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I think you are right. While I'm interested in sports governance/economics/history as a whole, I'm mainly dealing with figure skating, so biased towards the pro

by divan 3y ago

I think you are right. While I'm interested in sports governance/economics/history as a whole, I'm mainly dealing with figure skating, so biased towards the problems of this sport. Boxing rankings are fun, by the way. As far as I understand none of the four (!) sanctioning bodies in boxing have implemented anything resembling a mathematical model for rankings. Re: extrinsic motivation. SDT (Self-Determination Theory) actually has quite a lot of studies on this matter. See Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999) as an example [1] If you're designing reward/incentive system and want to maximize intrinsic motivation, what to choose – reward for showing up, reward for doing a task, reward for doing great or reward for winning? Here is a quick breakdown of these contingencies: 1. Task-noncontingent – Reward is given simply for being present and does not specifically require actually being engaged with the target activity. 2. Engagement-contingent – Reward is given for spending time being engaged with the target activity. 3. Completion-contingent – Reward is given for completing a target activity (sometimes within a time limit). 4. Task-contingent – Refers to a larger category containing both engagement-contingent and completion-contingent rewards. 5. Performance-contingent – Reward is given for reaching a specific performance standard, for example, doing better than 80% of other people who have done it. 6. Competitively contingent – Reward is given to the winner of a competition and the loser gets lesser or no rewards. Simplifying a bit, the results are – the further you go from 1 to 6, the stronger the detrimental effect on intrinsic motivation. In 6, for example, intrinsic motivation can be sustained only for the winners (because it carries a strong positive competence signal) but undermines it for everyone else. Note that it's not always bad. In a private company, you may want to get rid of "underperformers", so rewarding excellence works fine. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10589297/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10589297/

somenameforme 3y ago
I think this is quite strongly rebuked by nearly all of history. Things like participation trophies are quite a modern invention, at least in anything like the scale they have now. In the past it's not like there was some dramatically reduced desire to compete, if anything it may have been much higher. Anecdotally I'm sure you can also rebuke such, as can I. In sports and games I did do well in, I obviously did not start out amazingly, nor did I receive any accolades or such for merely existing. Yet I went on to thrive in a number of sports/games, in no small part because I wanted to reach the top. And the same is true of endless household names. E.g. Michael Jordan is quite famous for having been a bench warmer until he hit a growth (and competence) spurt, which started to transform him into the beast he would become. It's not like he just quit when he was relatively weak. The incidents of competitors which started and stayed at the top, through ever more stringent competition, are very much the exception, and not the rule. Yet if your above hypothesis was correct - they're pretty much all we'd see!
- divan 3y ago
  Well, it's not my hypothesis at all :) The link I posted is a review of the literature on the topic. I think the real problem with "participation trophies" is that it has very low competence signal. Not negative. But very low for everybody, regardless of performance. The winner's prize, at the same time, gives an extremely positive competence signal to the winner (at the expense of the negative signal to everybody else). Again, if you put yourself into the shoes of a designer of an incentive structure, then you are facing a trade-off here. Do you want more people to keep doing this activity, or do you want to single out top performers? In sports, I believe it's more of a cultural element. Scandinavian countries, for example, are notorious for their culture of not expressing their personal success (Janteloven). That fits well with the Nordic sports model. More individualistic countries or post-soviet countries with "win at all costs" sports ideology tend to favor incentive structures optimized for early top performers.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    With due respect you're begging the question here. The hypothesis you linked to is just that - a hypothesis. And it simply fails when looking at the past where there was both high sports participation, no such thing as participation trophies (again generally speaking - I'm sure some event some where had them, but they were not even remotely normalized), and winners were recognized. It also fails to explain why athletes often come from backgrounds of struggle. Or why athletes when faced with stronger competition (such as moving from JV to varsity, high school to college, etc.) don't just suddenly give up, and so forth, and so on. Ultimately I strongly disagree that participation trophies incentivize participation, as well as that merit trophies discourage it. It is plainly illogical. I'm certain I could dig through the study and find a way that their methodology could easily lead to false conclusions, but I'm not terribly interesting in doing so, and in any case such a thing would be highly unlikely to be persuasive anyhow - because we aren't arguing that study, but our own personal biases. And, like with just about everything, there's extensive evidence for whatever side you want to argue.
    - divan 3y ago

by divan 3y ago

somenameforme 3y ago

I think this is quite strongly rebuked by nearly all of history. Things like participation trophies are quite a modern invention, at least in anything like the scale they have now. In the past it's not like there was some dramatically reduced desire to compete, if anything it may have been much higher. Anecdotally I'm sure you can also rebuke such, as can I. In sports and games I did do well in, I obviously did not start out amazingly, nor did I receive any accolades or such for merely existing. Yet I went on to thrive in a number of sports/games, in no small part because I wanted to reach the top. And the same is true of endless household names. E.g. Michael Jordan is quite famous for having been a bench warmer until he hit a growth (and competence) spurt, which started to transform him into the beast he would become. It's not like he just quit when he was relatively weak. The incidents of competitors which started and stayed at the top, through ever more stringent competition, are very much the exception, and not the rule. Yet if your above hypothesis was correct - they're pretty much all we'd see!

divan 3y ago
Well, it's not my hypothesis at all :) The link I posted is a review of the literature on the topic. I think the real problem with "participation trophies" is that it has very low competence signal. Not negative. But very low for everybody, regardless of performance. The winner's prize, at the same time, gives an extremely positive competence signal to the winner (at the expense of the negative signal to everybody else). Again, if you put yourself into the shoes of a designer of an incentive structure, then you are facing a trade-off here. Do you want more people to keep doing this activity, or do you want to single out top performers? In sports, I believe it's more of a cultural element. Scandinavian countries, for example, are notorious for their culture of not expressing their personal success (Janteloven). That fits well with the Nordic sports model. More individualistic countries or post-soviet countries with "win at all costs" sports ideology tend to favor incentive structures optimized for early top performers.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  With due respect you're begging the question here. The hypothesis you linked to is just that - a hypothesis. And it simply fails when looking at the past where there was both high sports participation, no such thing as participation trophies (again generally speaking - I'm sure some event some where had them, but they were not even remotely normalized), and winners were recognized. It also fails to explain why athletes often come from backgrounds of struggle. Or why athletes when faced with stronger competition (such as moving from JV to varsity, high school to college, etc.) don't just suddenly give up, and so forth, and so on. Ultimately I strongly disagree that participation trophies incentivize participation, as well as that merit trophies discourage it. It is plainly illogical. I'm certain I could dig through the study and find a way that their methodology could easily lead to false conclusions, but I'm not terribly interesting in doing so, and in any case such a thing would be highly unlikely to be persuasive anyhow - because we aren't arguing that study, but our own personal biases. And, like with just about everything, there's extensive evidence for whatever side you want to argue.
  - divan 3y ago