Professional sports, particularly ones in which athletes are competing directly against one another individually (i.e sprinting and cycling), can become a setting for a prisoner's dilemma. With the presence of performance-enhancing drugs, athletes have a choice between taking these performance-enhancing drugs or not. As athletes have no information about the decisions of their competitors to take or not to take the drugs, they can decide to remain clean and avoid the risks associated with getting caught doping (typically bans from the sport) or take the drugs to gain a potential competitive advantage. The prisoner's dilemma analysis allows us to tease out why an athlete might decide to dope despite its irrationality given the steep consequences.
In a scenario with two athletes who have no information on the drug-taking habits of the other, both athletes are better off if they both remain clean. However, the dominant strategy is taking performance-enhancing drugs to gain an advantage over your opponent as neither athlete can trust the other. Taking the drugs gives you the best chance of winning given either decision by the other athlete. In theory, the addition of an "inspector" who tests the athletes and punishes the cheaters would correct this inefficiency and move the equilibrium to Pareto Optimality. However, in current practice, athletes do not fear the inspection process enough to refrain from using performance-enhancing drugs as shown by the continued reveal of cheaters in sports.
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