Tactics and the Tiger Woods-effect - Do "Quitters Never Win" ?

Tadashi · Mar 30, 2012

Ever thought of getting into a tournament where the pro play?

Well, in golf people voluntarily drop out, if Tiger Woods announces to play! I wonder what is your insight on this, maybe the techniques-tactics section is the wrong part of the board and it belongs to the tournament-section, dunno.

Anyhow, what is your gut feeling on this?

[...] we usually think of competition as bringing out the best in people, people striving to meet the high bar the competitor provides, but with Tiger Woods, he's so dominant that people just give up. [...] businesses shouldn't try to hire the best people, because if you bring in a superstar, people could just sit around and say "I'll never get a big bonus." One of the examples given in the story was at General Electric, only the top 20% get the big bonuses, so a superstar could discourage people from being in that top 20%. [...] Article was based on an unpublished article by researcher at Northwestern who discovered by carefully teasing out and controlling for all the relevant factors, that when Tiger Woods enters a tournament, his opponents score higher by 8/10s of a stroke--meaning they perform worse. [...] What is not true is that golfers who are already in the sport didn't give up when Tiger Woods came along . They worked incredibly harder--started lifting weights, stopped loafing, put in more hours. [...] let's look at golfers who were golfing before Tiger Woods came along, and then after he came along, and let's see whether on the similar courses before and after whether they took their game up a notch or said they'll never win.

[skip the rest for philosophically minded ...]

[The original] analysis is addressing a different question: within a given year, how do these players play in tournaments that Tiger is in versus ones he is not? If I thought I was a competitor with Tiger Woods and I saw him making some of the impossible shots, I could easily be lulled into thinking I could make those same shots and giving it a try, harming my score as a consequence--that would be one mechanism. Not making less effort, but trying things I can't do. Might take more chances; might decide to play for third, which does pay a lot, so might get more cautious. Open, by Andre Agassi, similar conversations with himself when he had to play Pete Sampras, dominant player of his era who usually beat Agassi. That's not the real question: the author of the article and economist who did the study don't just want to show about athletes in times of stress--want to generalize it to general notions about competition. Tiger impact might be true; but does it generalize to other settings like corporations?
Click to expand...

That science paper: http://home.business.utah.edu/finmh/Brown_Quitters_Never_Win.pdf
The cited guy: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/05/leamer_on_the_s.html

b.leung · Mar 30, 2012

The title should be "cheaters never win"-if you know what I mean... haha.
I do skip out on tournaments if I know a certain local champion is in it. Let's be honest, I do not train as much as I should... haha. Actually, I skip about 3/10 tournaments that I know high ranking players join.

Tournaments are expensive!

Tactics and the Tiger Woods-effect - Do "Quitters Never Win" ?

Tadashi Regular Member

b.leung Regular Member

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Tactics and the Tiger Woods-effect - Do "Quitters Never Win" ?

Tadashi Regular Member

b.leung Regular Member

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