Are Sunk Costs Irrelevant? Evidence from Playing Time in the National Basketball Association

Daniel Leeds (), Michael Leeds and Akira Motomura
Additional contact information
Daniel Leeds: University of Michigan

No 1304, DETU Working Papers from Department of Economics, Temple University

Abstract: The importance of sunk costs in economic decision making is a major source of disagreement between neoclassical and behavioral economists. We provide a direct test of the role played by sunk costs using evidence from the National Basketball Association. Because teams have a greater financial and psychic stake in players chosen in the lottery portion of the draft and in the draft’s first round, behavioral economists predict that teams are more committed to them than to players selected later in the draft and give these players more playing time. Neoclassical economists would assert that current performance should be all that matters when allocating playing time. Our study builds on previous studies in two ways. First, we use a more appropriate data set than earlier studies, one that captures total available playing time more accurately than previous studies by accounting for time lost due to injury, suspension, and other exogenous factors. Second and more importantly, we use a more appropriate estimation technique --- regression discontinuity (RD) --- to show how behavior changes when a player's draft position crosses the threshold between lottery and non-lottery or first- and second-round status. Our RD estimates provide little evidence that teams allocate more playing time to more highly-drafted players than to otherwise identical teammates. We conclude that the neoclassical model more appropriately captures behavior.

Keywords: competition; middlemen; ambiguity; platform; two-sided market; market intermediation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D03 J23 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cla.temple.edu/RePEc/documents/DETU_13_04.pdf First version, 2013 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: ARE SUNK COSTS IRRELEVANT? EVIDENCE FROM PLAYING TIME IN THE NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION (2015)
Working Paper: Are Sunk Costs Irrelevant? Evidence from Playing Time in the National Basketball Association (2013)
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:tem:wpaper:1304

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DETU Working Papers from Department of Economics, Temple University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dimitrios Diamantaras ().