SPORT AS A COMMON PROPERTY RESOURCE - A SOLUTION TO THE DILEMMAS OF DOPING

The use of drugs in high-performance sports (doping) is a common pool resource (CPR) dilemma: regardless of the number of other athletes who dope, the athlete with strong tastes for victory will find doping opt imal; yet if all athletes dope, they all bear negative health conseque nces, although each one's odds of victory are not greatly changed. The current regulatory approach relies entirely on centralized bureaucrat ic methods and is ineffective. The authors use insights developed in t he common property resource literature and the theory of social norms to analyze the failure of these methods. The programs they propose-the drug diary and a collegial enforcement system-are superior to the cur rent system in that they encourage the development of athletic norms a gainst unfair drug use. In the end, such norms are the only hope for c ontrolling doping, which is becoming increasingly difficult to observe . Empirical evidence shows that such norms against unobservable sports violations can be very powerful. Norms of conduct in golf, for exampl e, successfully enforce that sport's many rules regulating unobservabl e aspects of play.