K. Damon Aiken
Ajay Sukhdial
Richard M. Campbell
Jr.
and Aubrey Kent

While previous research has found support for the existence of tanking in professional sport, attitudinal complexities surrounding the phenomenon have yet to be investigated. This study utilized Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to obtain a national sample of National Basketball Association (NBA) fans. The sample contained fans of all thirty NBA teams. Respondents provided data regarding their overall attitudes toward tanking as well as their underlying old school values, time-oriented values, and ethics-based values. Results indicate that fans have a relatively strong dislike for perceived...Read more

Brian P. Soebbing
Brad R. Humphreys
Daniel S. Mason

Many sports leagues use unbalanced schedules where teams do not play each opponent an equal number of times each season. In many leagues, teams that do not make the playoffs have the opportunity to improve by drafting highly skilled amateur players in the next entry draft, but the opportunity to pick first in the draft provides teams with an incentive to intentionally lose games. This has been a concern in the National Basketball Association (NBA), where the draft format has been altered three times since the 1980s. This research examines the strategic behavior of eliminated teams against...Read more