Riding High – Success in Sports and the Rise of Doping Cultures Holger Strulik∗ Leibniz Universitat Hannover, Discussion Paper No. 372 ISSN 0949-9962 August 2007 Abstract. This article develops a socio-economic model that analyzes the doping decision of professional athletes. In their decision to use performance enhancing drugs athletes do not only evaluate the costs and benefits (in terms of potential rank improvement). They also take into account peer-group ap- proval of using drugs. Peer-group approval is modelled as a lagged endogenous variable that depends on the share of drug using athletes in the history of a sport. This way, the model can explain multiple equilibria as “doping cul- tures”. Besides the comparative statics of the equilibrium (how can a doping culture be eliminated?) the article also investigates how the doping decision is affected by standards set by the respective leader in a sport, e.g. Olympic qualification marks, and by the taste of victory, i.e. the disproportionate public veneration of winners. Keywords: sport, doping, approval, social dynamics, weak athletes, super- heroes. JEL: A13, D71, K40, L83, M50. ∗University of Hannover, Department of Economics, Koenigsworther Platz 1, 30167 Hannover, Germany,
[email protected]. I would like to thank Luca Rebeggiani and Stefanie Strulik for useful comments. I never cheated. (Jan Ullrich) I may have used the spray a bit more than usual, but I haven’t done anything illegal. (Alessandro Petacchi) So I did it, but I didn’t feel totally guilty about it because everybody else seemed to be doing it. (Frankie Andreu) 1.