Cycling and peer pressure
Jul. 23rd, 2010 03:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylAn interesting overlap between the worlds of professional cycling and ethics over on the Guardian's bike blog.
Inspired by an event in the Tour de France, William Fotheringham discusses the unwritten rules that govern the event — you do not press an advantage when your nearest rival suffers a mechanical failure, stops for a pee, stops to say hello to his family etc. After describing the way these are enforced through peer pressure, he laments the fact that the code does not appear to cover drug taking.
However, the two problems are clearly not equivalent.
The behaviours governed by the unwritten rules occur in public and, thanks to ubiquitous TV coverage, can be scrutinised after the event. This means that a rider breaking the rules can easily be identified and subject to group punishment. In game theory, it's like a form of repeated prisoner's dilemma where the results of each previous round are available to each player. Thus, cooperation is extremely stable because as soon as a player defects for his own advantage, all the other players will know about it by the next round and will most likely take retaliatory action.
The behavioural rules governing drug taking are quite different. Firstly, there is a lack of public information; drug consumption occurs in private, so it other riders don't have direct knowledge of it but instead must rely on inferences. This means that the risks of discovery by another rider are much lower than in the unwritten rules case — remember that Fotheringham's point is that anti-doping should be enforced by peer pressure and not by an external agency. Secondly, if we accept as an axiom that the drugs do indeed provide some form of performance advantage, then the cost of not taking them is high.
So in this second case, we are presented with a completely different problem: the risks of getting caught are low while, benefits are substantial and neither party truly knows about the other's choices. Which, I think, means that it may not be rational to adopt the strategy of the cooperative player of prisoner's dilemma. Which, perhaps, explains the existence of the various anti-doping agencies...
Inspired by an event in the Tour de France, William Fotheringham discusses the unwritten rules that govern the event — you do not press an advantage when your nearest rival suffers a mechanical failure, stops for a pee, stops to say hello to his family etc. After describing the way these are enforced through peer pressure, he laments the fact that the code does not appear to cover drug taking.
However, the two problems are clearly not equivalent.
The behaviours governed by the unwritten rules occur in public and, thanks to ubiquitous TV coverage, can be scrutinised after the event. This means that a rider breaking the rules can easily be identified and subject to group punishment. In game theory, it's like a form of repeated prisoner's dilemma where the results of each previous round are available to each player. Thus, cooperation is extremely stable because as soon as a player defects for his own advantage, all the other players will know about it by the next round and will most likely take retaliatory action.
The behavioural rules governing drug taking are quite different. Firstly, there is a lack of public information; drug consumption occurs in private, so it other riders don't have direct knowledge of it but instead must rely on inferences. This means that the risks of discovery by another rider are much lower than in the unwritten rules case — remember that Fotheringham's point is that anti-doping should be enforced by peer pressure and not by an external agency. Secondly, if we accept as an axiom that the drugs do indeed provide some form of performance advantage, then the cost of not taking them is high.
So in this second case, we are presented with a completely different problem: the risks of getting caught are low while, benefits are substantial and neither party truly knows about the other's choices. Which, I think, means that it may not be rational to adopt the strategy of the cooperative player of prisoner's dilemma. Which, perhaps, explains the existence of the various anti-doping agencies...
