Публикации автора

In this paper, we analyse the strategic order of athletes in sports relays. It is generally believed that the strongest athlete should perform the last. In sports, ‘choking under pressure’ is a major phenomenon that manifests in athletes’ performance decrement when faced the stressful conditions. We focus on the pressure the athletes experience when their team is lagging behind the competitor in accuracy-based relays. In theoretical models, we found that choking under pressure has an impact on strategic decisions on team formation when teams consist of players with differentiated skills. Without ‘choking under pressure’, teams are indifferent to athletes’ order. If all athletes experience the same magnitude of performance decrements, the strictly dominant strategy is: a stronger athlete starts and a weaker athlete fi nishes the race. For the case of differentiated performance decrements, we fi nd the optimal strategy as a function of those decrements. The conventional wisdom strategy “Weaker to start, stronger to fi nish” is strictly dominant only when the resilience of a strong player is high enough and the performance decrement is much lower than a weak player’s