Interesting sports-related posts

I'm a sucker for scientific studies that focus on sports and performance, and for some reason this weekend was a big weekend for these kinds of studies. The first one I came across was in this morning's New York Times.

Two economists at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, while investigating how round numbers influence goals, examined the behavior of major league hitters from 1975 to 2008 who entered what became their final plate appearance of the season with a batting average of .299 or .300 (in at least 200 at-bats).

They found that the 127 hitters at .299 or .300 batted a whopping .463 in that final at-bat, demonstrating a motivation to succeed well beyond normal (and in what was usually an otherwise meaningless game).

Most deliciously, not one of the 61 hitters who entered at .299 drew a walk — which would have fired those ugly 9s into permanence because batting average considers bases on balls neither hit nor at-bat.

I think this sort of finding has some interesting implications for how we design compensation and other structured incentives. The Times didn't mention how many of the 127 batters had incentives in their contracts for hitting .300 or above, but it's clear that the threshold altered the way the players approached their work. That none of the .299 batters drew a walk certainly shows that their behavior was different--whether for better or for worse. Simply, people respond strongly to incentives, and we need to recognize what this will mean when we design incentive-laden systems.

The second report was featured on Time's NewsFeed, and focused on tennis rather than baseball.

A study, which appeared in the Public Library of Science ONE journal, has shown that the loud grunts of some tennis players can give them a real advantage over opponents. The researchers from Canada and America showed that making “extraneous sound” could interfere with your opponent's performance, making their responses both slower and less accurate. 

The report suggested that the grunt could also hamper a receiver who was trying to judge the spin and speed of a ball from the sound made off the racket.

I sincerely hope this one isn't true, lest we witness more tennis matches like this one:

[New York Times]
[Time NewsFeed]