Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Gamesmanship and Collective Reputation

I've often wondered why diving is so prevalent in football. Even if one manages to fool a referee occasionally, the act is captured on video for all to see and inevitably hurts the reputation of the player and his team. Quite apart from the resulting ridicule, there are also long term costs on the field. Referees are more likely to be suspicious when they see players with tarnished reputations tumbling like bowling pins with little apparent contact. Some legitimate fouls may not be called as a result, and there's always the possibility that a player may be cautioned or sent off for unsportsmanlike conduct. So the whole culture of diving, and the fact that it has been embraced so thoroughly by certain teams while being avoided and frowned upon by others, has always been a bit of a puzzle to me.
In a fascinating article, Andrea Tallarita provides some rationalization for this behavior. He explains that diving is a part of a broad range of calculated tactics that are used to get into an opponent's head, inducing frustration, loss of concentration and overreaction. Zidane's costly headbutt of Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final is the most famous of many examples. Here's how Tallarita explains the approach: 
Perhaps nothing has been more influential in determining the popular perception of the Italian game than furbizia, the art of guile... The word ‘furbizia’ itself means guile, cunning or astuteness. It refers to a method which is often (and admittedly) rather sly, a not particularly by-the-book approach to the performative, tactical and psychological part of the game. Core to furbizia is that it is executed by means of stratagems which are available to all players on the pitch, not only to one team. What are these stratagems? Here are a few: tactical fouls, taking free kicks before the goalkeeper has finished positioning himself, time-wasting, physical or verbal provocation and all related psychological games, arguably even diving... Anyone can provoke an adversary, but it takes real guile (real furbizia) to find the weakest links in the other team’s psychology, then wear them out and bite them until something or someone gives in - all without ever breaking a single rule in the book of football. 
Viewed in this light, the prevalence of diving starts to make a bit more sense. Even if one doesn't win the immediate foul or penalty, the practice can unsettle an opponent and induce errors. And a reputation for diving can cause an opponent to avoid even minimal, routine contact. This is gamesmanship, pure and simple.
But if gamesmanship is so rewarding, why are some teams reluctant to embrace it? Why do the Spanish play such a clean version of the game and consider these tactics to be beneath them, while their closest neighbors, the Italians and Portuguese, have no such qualms? Here is Tallarita's explanation:
Ultimately, these differences come from two irreconcilable visions of the game. The Spanish style understands football as something like a fencing match, a rapid and meticulous art of noble origins where honour is the brand of valour. To the Italians, football is more like an ancient battle, a primal and inclement bronze-age scenario where survival rules over honour.
But this just begs the question: why are the visions of the game so different in nations that are geographically and culturally so close? I think that the answer (or at least part of it) lies in the fact that once a collective reputation has been established, it becomes individually rational for new entrants to the group to act in ways that preserve it. This mechanism was explored in a very interesting 1996 paper by Jean Tirole in which he explains why "new members of an organization may suffer from an original sin of their elders long after the latter are gone." 
The reason why the past behavior of the group affects the incentives of current and future members is that past behavior is not perfectly observable at the level of the individual. Groups consist of overlapping cohorts, with older members mixed in with newer ones. Those older members who have behaved "badly" in the past and thus ruined their reputations have no incentive to behave "well" currently. But suspicion also falls on the newer members, who cannot be perfectly distinguished from the older ones. This suspicion alters incentives in such a manner as to make it self-fulfilling. Even if the entire group would benefit from a change in reputation, this may be impossible to accomplish. Lifting the reputation of the group would require several cohorts to behave well despite being presumed to behave badly, and this is a sacrifice that does not serve their individual interests.
While I have used Tirole's model here to account for variations across teams in their levels of gamesmanship, his own motivation is much broader: he is interested in understanding variations across societies in levels of corruption and differences among firms in their reputation for product quality. And one can think of numerous other examples in which history has saddled a group with a reputation that is hard to shake because doing so requires significant and sustained collective sacrifices from current and future members.

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Update (6/25). An excellent comment (as usual) by Andrew Oh-Willeke:
The notion that cultural founder effects have great institutional legacies also has strong implications for bankruptcy policy and for policy related to government bureaucracies.

It suggests that completely shutting down one organization, even if it will be replaced by a new organization doing the same thing with the same technology should often be preferred to trying to reorganize existing organizations, because the failure of the troubled firm or bureaucratic unit may be a problem with organizational culture that would otherwise persist, rather than more "objective" factors.

This might also suggest that seemingly absurd economic development strategies, like Attaturk's law mandating that all men wear bowler hats, may have more merit to them than they seem to at an obvious level. The example Malcolm Gladwell used of this phenomena was the increased safety record that was observed at Korean Airlines when flight crews started to use English rather than Korean.
I hope to say more about this in a subsequent post.

An alternative (and perhaps complementary) perspective on heterogeneity in behavior across teams comes from Cyril Hedoin at Rationalité Limitée, who argues that there are major differences across national leagues in gamesmanship norms, sustained by the sanctioning of those who fail to conform to local expectations.

I'm in Istanbul for a conference at the moment and will be slow to respond to emails and comments for a few days.

6 comments:

  1. Diving is "so prevalent" in football because the incentives favor it. It is not without risk but the payoff for successful diving is far greater than the downside risks.

    In the box even with good execution by the attacker(s) only a small percentages of offensive forays result in goals. But a very high percentage of penalty kicks end up goals so having a foul called on the defense has a much higher expected value than having a regular go of it. Yes, there is some small chance a diving player will be called for unsportsmanlike conduct but it will very rarely be more than a yellow card so it can be managed.

    Diving can be used in an attempt to manipulate the referee (look at all the whining these guys do). And it can also be used as an attempt to deflect a player's failure to capitalize on the situation.

    As far as hurting reputation or resulting in ridicule, I see no real evidence of that. Successful cheating in football is part of the game's culture. Maradona's World Cup handball goal didn't hurt his reputation, it enhanced it. Failure is what hurts reputations. A successful diver's reputation won't be hurt. Captured on video is all after the fact and doesn't matter. Scoring goals and winning is what counts.

    I don't really see the dramatic cultural differences between teams either. Sure there are teams that do not embrace gamesmanship to the extent that others do but it seems to be widely accepted by all. Do you really think a player with Premier League experience and/or Bundesliga experience and/or ... automatically morphs into his national team's culture when he joins the team?

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  2. The notion that cultural founder effects have great institutional legacies also has strong implications for bankruptcy policy and for policy related to government bureaucracies.

    It suggests that completely shutting down one organization, even if it will be replaced by a new organization doing the same thing with the same technology should often be preferred to trying to reorganize existing organizations, because the failure of the troubled firm or bureaucratic unit may be a problem with organizational culture that would otherwise persist, rather than more "objective" factors.

    This might also suggest that seemingly absurd economic development strategies, like Attaturk's law mandating that all men wear bowler hats, may have more merit to them than they seem to at an obvious level. The example Malcolm Gladwell used of this phenomena was the increased safety record that was observed at Korean Airlines when flight crews started to use English rather than Korean.

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  3. I don't see diving as very mysterious. Usually when players dive they aren't about to score; they're merely in the process of trying to get into a scoring position. But 9 out of 10 penalties are converted. So from a cynical-strategic point of view, divind makes sense.
    To me the mystery is why referees are so often fooled, even though they, too watch the slow motion replays. E.g. in the game between Brazil and Ivory Coast, Kaka was sent off after an opponent pretended that he's hit him in the face. The referee can't have seen the offence. If he had, he would have known that the Ivory Coast player was faking. So why was he so easily fooled?

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  4. I think that the answer (or at least part of it) lies in the fact that once a collective reputation has been established, it becomes individually rational for new entrants to the group to act in ways that preserve it.

    Just so. Daniel Davies, in discussing the MAD deterrence strategy, once described this process in a very apt and succinct way. Paraphrasing, he observed that a reputation which is well worth having (i.e. worth maintaining) may not be worth acquiring.

    In evolutionary biology, MAD-style deterrents emerge only over the course of manymany co-evolutionary interactions, comprising terminal states for many individual agents. The path-dependencies associated with a particular organism's reputation as a practitioner of MAD are concealed within its genome and ancestry, so individual agents already have (or not) a reputation worth maintaining.

    In economics (or politics, or sports) the iterations are fewer, terminal states are less frequent, inheritance is much weaker, and the fitness landscape is more volatile. So the path-dependencies for the reputation of particular institution or agent are much more significant and apparent.

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  5. Another excellent post. But note cultures can be changed nonetheless very quickly. Here’s Paul Romer from a very important post at his charter cities blog :

    According to Transparency International’s corruption index, corruption is “sticky.” Over time corrupt countries tend to remain corrupt, while clean countries remain clean. This makes it tempting to lean on cultural interpretations to explain the persistence or absence corruption.

    Hong Kong provides a compelling counterexample, showing that a change in rules can defeat a culture of corruption. Though it once had high levels of corruption, comparable to those in mainland China in the 1970s, the British government was able to effectively banish corruption. In 1977, 38% of the population thought that corruption was widespread, by 1982 only 8% did.

    at: http://chartercities.org/blog/75/rules-and-culture-corruption-in-hong-kong

    I strongly recommend reading the whole thing.

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  6. Andrew, thanks for your comment, which I've appended in an update to the original post.

    Richard, I agree. One thing I like about Tirole's model is that it accounts for persistent behavioral differences without appealing to an essentialist view of culture, and allows us to start thinking about policy responses.

    ES (and Emrys) I don't buy the idea that everyone does it, or that it doesn't hurt reputation. There are some great players who never dive or fake injuries even though (given their reputations) they are precisely the ones who would be most likely to get away with it. And Maradona's handball will always tarnish his reputation, though he redeemed himself by scoring one of the greatest individual goals in world cup history in the very same game.

    Darius, thanks, I'll give this some thought. The Davies quote is excellent.

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