More sports rules and perverse incentives

Good stories in Slate and NY Mag about the zero-tolerance false-start rules in Olympic track, under which a racer is disqualified if he false-starts. This is the third version of the Olympic rule. Pre-2003, each runner was allowed one false start and was disqualified only on the second. In 2003, the rule was changed to give the entire field one false start, with a DQ imposed on whoever does the second false start. The current rule was enacted in 2010, making this the second Olympic games under that rule; we have seen two DQs this week, although not by any favorites. Usain Bolt wass DQ'd under the rule at the 2011 World Championships, the only Olympic or world championship final he has lost since 2008. French hurdler Wilhem Belocian was DQd earlier this week and was seen falling to the track in tears, but he had qualified seventh out of eight runners.

The 2010 rule change was designed, at least in part, to eliminate perverse incentives. Slower runners would intentionally false start, using up the "freebie" for the field. This forced faster starters and runners to be a bit more cautious, and thus to hesitate just a bit off the blocks, lest they pick up that second false start that would disqualify them. The new rule eliminates the intentional false start by eliminating the benefit, and thus the incentive, for the slower runner to do this.


This sounds a bit like the logic behind the Infield Fly Rule: 1) Runners were gaining a potentially big advantage (slowing down the fast starters/runners) through the intentional false start; 2) The faster runners could not really counter this move, except perhaps by not false-starting following the intentional freebie; 3) slow runners were intentionally acting contrary to expectations (you do not want to false start); and 4) the advantage offered a perverse incentive to the slower runners to intentionally false-start (although not a great one--the trick did not work very often). The second prong is weak--the faster runners could counter the strategy by not false-starting, something they could do more easily than runners can avoid a double play on an uncaught infield fly. But this is an interesting comparable situation that is worth including in my discussion of similarly justified rules in other sports.

This situation shows the role that aesthetics play in creating sports rules. Rulemakers could have disincentived intentional false starts by returning to the old rule of giving every runner one freebie. But that old rule created problems of multiple false starts by multiple runners, causing long delays, fan boredom, and television overruns. So the new rule, while harsher, is aesthetically favorable to the sport.

Finally, runners and rulemakers have minimized the effect of the harsh rule. All runners slow down their starts a bit to avoid the risk--Bolt, never a fast starter, has slowed his start even more, relying on his remarkable ability to dominate the last 30-40 meters (as he did in winning gold in the 100m this week). And the rulemakers narrowed what qualifies as a false start to exclude flinches and twitches, so a runner false-starts only if his feet leave the starting blocks or his hands leave the track.