Ndamukong Suh is a defensive lineman for the Detroit Lions
who just received a fine of $100 thousand for an illegal block during last Sunday’s
game. While being considered one of the most dominant defensive linemen, he has
a reputation for being a “dirty” player accruing multiple penalties for
unnecessary roughness and unsportsmanlike conduct. While the individual fine to
Suh is not an externality, the negative sports coverage to the team shown in THIS link, and many others like it that have followed Suh for the past couple
years, is a negative externality of production. While Suh is
producing tackles, sacks, and defensive opportunities for other players, the
negative sports coverage is putting stress on the locker room relationships and
the Lion’s image.
The fines levied and possible future suspensions mirror the
action of the courts in the fisherman/pollution example. For Suh’s negative externality
of production to be internalized, the Detroit Lions would have to offer to pay
him for not being penalized or he would have to pay for the right to continue
to get flagged, depending on if Suh has the right to play as he wishes or the
Lions have a right to a player who doesn’t get flagged respectively. This
suggestion would probably meet with strong backlash because most people probably
think it wrong to offer players bonuses for being sportsman-like or inversely a
player being able to pay to be unsportsman-like.
1 comment:
If the detroit lions were to pay Suh AND ONLY Suh to NOT commmit penalties, this would be a pareto inefficient outcome as Suh is getting benefit over everyone else.
So to overcome this situation, assuming rational actors, other players could start committing penalties in the hopes that the team would start paying them AS WELL to stop committing penalties. Eventually the team and players would be at odds with each other leading to a Holdout Problem where either the players or team holdout from a certain agreement in hopes that the team would raise the amount paid to NOT commit penalties, or for the managers, the hope that the players would eventually tire of paying fines and stop committing penalties, and subsequently not have to pay them to stop.
Personally I think the optimal way to control this market force of penalty fine vs penalty prevention bonus cost, since it technically a market failure due to a possible holdout problem, is to simply control Suh vida direct regulation: benching him. When he misbehaves, bench him. Eventually he will want to play again, and start behaving.
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