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nihoul_37481200_2017.pdf
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- In this thesis, the economic incentives that are at the core of doping will be analyzed. This issue has become crucial with the ever-growing visibility of sports and budget allocated to this fight. The first part will consist in understanding the doping phenomenon in an economic perspective, in order to better fight it afterwards. By analyzing several economic papers, we will first examine an economic model of the doping choice that athletes in an evolutionary contest have to make with regards to the game theory. This model embodies a multiplayer competition made of repeated double-player games. We will start by examining heterogeneous games the information structure impacts these games. Then we will analyze the special case of a homogeneous distribution of talents and the different preferences the agents can have. The goal is to determine the possible Nash equilibria depending on the parameters of the game and to study how doping can spread or fade by itself, then we will observe how the intervention of the authorities can impact the outcome of the game. Next, we will discuss the model from a historical perspective and a different approach to the multiplayer-type of game. We will also examine the impact of the design of a competition. For this, we will examine how a different prize structure can modify the equilibria of the game. This will be followed by a discussion, partly based on research into psychology, on the intensity of a competition and its consequences: does it foster doping or legal efforts, or both? Once these mechanisms have been understood, we will examine in the second part how the fight against doping can be implemented. We will first determine if the fight against doping makes sense by considering the publications of several authors from economic, philosophical and scientific backgrounds, both detractors and partisans of this fight. We will then discuss the possibility of implementing effective anti-doping. We will examine if the public supports it in opinion and in actions through surveys and empirical data, as well as the consequences its withdrawal can have on the sports world and on the sponsors’ behavior. The role of the authorities, who may suffer from a lack of credibility, will be studied through different economic models that study how the incentives of the sports organizers to actively fight doping can be influenced by the presence of critical sports consumers, whether they are spectators, viewers, broadcasters or sponsors. Finally, we will, in a first time, present how the current anti-doping system is inefficient and outdated. Based on our earlier study of economic models, as well as on new ones and on suggestions from authors from different backgrounds, we will examine the different proposals and their possible implementation.