Should the strongest be the last? Strategic choice of ordering in sports relays

N. Avkhimovich
Additional contact information
N. Avkhimovich: HSE University, Moscow, Russia

Journal of the New Economic Association, 2024, vol. 62, issue 1, 31-48

Abstract: In this paper, we analyse the strategic order of athletes in sports relays. It is generally believed that the strongest athlete should perform the last. In sports, 'choking under pressure' is a major phenomenon that manifests in athletes' performance decrement when faced the stressful conditions. We focus on the pressure the athletes experience when their team is lagging behind the competitor in accuracy-based relays. In theoretical models, we found that choking under pressure has an impact on strategic decisions on team formation when teams consist of players with differentiated skills. Without 'choking under pressure', teams are indifferent to athletes' order. If all athletes experience the same magnitude of performance decrements, the strictly dominant strategy is: a stronger athlete starts and a weaker athlete finishes the race. For the case of differentiated performance decrements, we find the optimal strategy as a function of those decrements. The conventional wisdom strategy "Weaker to start, stronger to finish" is strictly dominant only when the resilience of a strong player is high enough and the performance decrement is much lower than a weak player's.

Keywords: choking under pressure; relay races; strategic athletes' ordering; team formation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 C70 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econorus.org/repec/journl/2024-62-31-48r.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nea:journl:y:2024:i:62:p:31-48

DOI: 10.31737/22212264_2024_1_31-48

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the New Economic Association is currently edited by Victor Polterovich and Aleksandr Rubinshtein

More articles in Journal of the New Economic Association from New Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alexey Tcharykov ().