Riding High – Success in Sports and the Rise of Doping Cultures

This article develops a socio-economic model that analyzes the doping decision of professional athletes. In their evaluation of whether to use performance enhancing drugs athletes consider not only costs and benefits (through rank improvement) but also approval by their fellow athletes. Peergroup approval is modeled as a lagged endogenous variable depending on the share of doping athletes in the history of a sport. This way, the model can explain an equilibrium of high incidence of doping as a “doping culture”. Besides the comparative statics of the equilibrium (how can a doping culture be eliminated?) the article also investigates how the doping decision is affected by standards set by the respective leader in a sport, e.g. Olympic qualification marks, and by the taste for victory resulting from the disproportionate public veneration of winners.