A Comparison of Anti-Doping Measures in Sporting Contests

This paper proposes a new anti-doping policy. In a conditional superannuation scheme athletes have to pay a certain fraction of their season income from sports into a superannuation fund from which they can only draw if they have never been caught doping. Theoretically, this fund has two important advantages over conventional anti-doping policies such as bans and fines. It does not lose its deterrence effect when athletes get near the end of their careers such as in the case of bans and it can deal with the widespread problem that drug cheats are often only found out much later when the detection technology has caught up with doping practices. We build a model of a dynamic sporting contest, implement it in the laboratory, and compare the performance of our policy to that of traditional policies. Our policy compares favorably with respect to doping prevention without reducing the quality of competition more than other measures do.