The Tiger Woods Effect

[HelicopterEconDad]

Applying your PhD in economics to analyzing golfers' scores is like using your cardiovascular surgery training to carving a turkey: no matter how elegantly you perform your craft, in the end you have wasted your talent.

[TruDog]

Okay, I do find it rather amusing to read people who have never done any graduate-level applied work calling someone else's research "disturbingly unimportant."

Well said, notacolour.

Even though the topic may not be as important as proposing improvements to market efficiency or the education system, it sends an important signal about her ability to do competent applied economics. And it definitely gets her name out to more economists than some rather bland applied paper.

This also leads to an interesting question: Would any of you consider a purely theoretical paper to be disturbingly unimportant, as some would say that such a paper would not have any connection to the 'real world?' I'm not taking an opinion on that one, but it's worth being the devil's advocate here.

[fp3690]

Okay, I do find it rather amusing to read people who have never done any graduate-level applied work calling someone else's research "disturbingly unimportant."

I'm pretty sure my friend econphilomath didn't mean anything in a bad way. However, I'll have to partly agree, in the sense that this seems to be a bad choice for job market paper. The job market paper is arguably one of (if not the one) the most important papers of your career. It's quite possible that several departments passed it over barely giving it a glance, because it looks "weird". This is the kind of stuff you do when you can afford to (like Krugman writing about inter-stellar trade for the love of god), not for something this important.

[can_econ]

I haven't read the paper but went to the seminar. The point of the paper went beyond golf - incentive schemes which are like touraments in that one's relative performance, rather than one's absolute performance, is used to determine one's payoff, are used outside of sports.

One example is that a boss at a real estate firm might give a big bonus to the best performer, (I think this is the example she used) at the office. It sounds like it would make the real estate agents want to work hard for a big bonus, but if one person consistently outperforms everyone, then why would everyone else want to exert extra effort for almost no expected payoff?

In golf, the idea is that you can exert extra effort by getting to the course early, taking extra care on your shots, etc.

[commodore]

I'm pretty sure my friend econphilomath didn't mean anything in a bad way. However, I'll have to partly agree, in the sense that this seems to be a bad choice for job market paper. The job market paper is arguably one of (if not the one) the most important papers of your career. It's quite possible that several departments passed it over barely giving it a glance, because it looks "weird". This is the kind of stuff you do when you can afford to (like Krugman writing about inter-stellar trade for the love of god), not for something this important.

Spot on. Economics has interesting things to say about interesting topics, even things like sports. But the job market paper is not something that should be done for fun or for play. That comes when you have a job and have tenure and can spend time doing fun things that interest you.

[notacolour]

Seriously.

(1) Many of you didn't even bother to skim the beginning of the paper, where the motivation is laid out relating this to, you know, the corporate world. A lot of doing good applied work involves learning how to approach problems creatively, and given that there isn't much data on similar competitions in a corporate environment, this is a pretty nice way to get at the question of interest.

(2) Once again: Please stop knocking other people's job market papers until you have done serious applied work of your own. I'm sure your job market papers will all deal with truly significant world problems and will pass muster with undergrad econ majors everywhere, but until then...maybe you could tone down the pomposity?

[Legatus]

I think the important thing here is that the main message of the paper is not about golf... where else are you going to get the data on the impact of superstars in tournaments settings? And to compare this with the interstellar trade paper? Clearly not everyone is going to get a nobel prize for their job market paper, but she has a result that contradicts the current literature, provides a theoretical justification for why rational agents would perform worse, and finds an example with lots of data in a competitive environment that is analogous to a business setting. Other than that, seems like the paper was a complete waste of time.

[asianecon]

This also leads to an interesting question: Would any of you consider a purely theoretical paper to be disturbingly unimportant, as some would say that such a paper would not have any connection to the 'real world?' I'm not taking an opinion on that one, but it's worth being the devil's advocate here.

DUH? Theory without any obvious or direct connection to the real world is not the same as an applied work without any obvious real world connection. Applied work without real world relevance is just work.

But I do think the paper is interesting and relevant (I just read the introduction so spare me..)

[Legatus]

Heh, well said notacolour.

[asianecon]

For those who have read the paper, how does the author control for the possibility that as econphilo notes, golfers face tougher golf courses for more prestigious tournaments?