Winning Isn't Everything: Corruption in Sumo Wrestling

By Mark Duggan, Steven D. Levitt. 2002

331 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although the theoretical literature on corruption is well developed, empirical work in this area has lagged because it has proven difficult to isolate corrupt behavior in the data. In this paper, we look for evidence of corruption in an unlikely place: the highest echelons of Japanese sumo wrestling. This paper provides strong statistical evidence documenting match rigging in sumo wrestling. A non-linearity in the incentive structure of promotion leads to gains from trade between wrestlers on the margin for achieving a winning record and their opponents. We show that wrestlers win a disproportionate share of the matches when they are on the margin. Increased effort can not explain the findings. Winning on the bubble is more frequent when the two competitors have met often in the past. Success on the bubble tends to rise over the course of a wrestler's career, but declines in his last year, consistent with the game theoretic predictions. Wrestlers who are victorious when on the bubble lose more frequently than would be expected the next time they meet that opponent, suggesting that part of the payment for throwing a match is future payment in kind. Systematic differences across wrestling stables suggest that the stables play a role in facilitating the corruption. In times of increased media scrutiny, the match rigging disappears.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f8cd5040cf5af1063999ffddb39dd61f6b0db96

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Citations in the corpus

Laboratory Measure of Cheating Predicts School Misconduct (2018, positive): “…world (e.g., Volkswagen’s recent emission fraud or interest and exchange rate manipulations in the financial industry) to rigged sport competitions (Duggan et al. 2002), rampant corruption in developing countries (Pande and Olken 2012; Banerjee et al. 2013), and student and teacher cheating…”
Corruption in Asia: Pervasiveness and arbitrariness (2007, background): “Second, it is not arbitrary since for the opponents who have not accumulated seven previous wins, winning the game is not as important as the one who needs the eighth winning (Duggan & Levitt, 2002).”
An Inferred Valuation Method (2009, background): “Some papers focus on honesty as an outcome of various economic forces (e.g., Akerlof 1983; Duggan and Levitt 2002).”
Electoral Accountability and Corruption: Evidence from the Audits of Local Governments (2011, neutral): “Several empirical studies that focus on illegal behavior have used indirect evidence to analyze its determinants and consequences (see for example Duggan and Levitt (2002); Fisman (2002); Fisman and Wei (2004), Bandiera, Prat, and Valletti (2009)).”
The Influence of Social Forces: Evidence from the Behavior of Football Referees (2008, background): “Duggan and Levitt (2002) follow a similar approach of looking at the ‘‘relevant margin’’ in their study of corruption in Sumo wrestling tournaments.”
Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud (2016, neutral): “The most established literature on the topic of review fraud comes from computer science, and focuses on developing data-mining algorithms that leverage observable review characteristics, such as textual features, and reviewers’ social networks, to identify abnormal reviewing patterns (for example, ”
Favoritism Under Social Pressure (2005, methodology): “We do this by analyzing the deviations from honest behavior in a sports context, an approach followed by Duggan and Levitt (2002) as well.”
Trafficking Networks and the Mexican Drug War (2015, background): “…examine topics ranging from earnings manipulation (Bollen and Pool, 2009; Bhojraj et al., 2009) to the production of defective products (Krueger and Mas, 2004) to fixing the outcomes of sporting events (Wolfers, 2006; Duggan and Levitt, 2002) to sex-selective abortions in Taiwan (Lin et al., 2008).”
Referee Bias (2016, background): “An extreme example is bribing, which typically involves material incentives.4 We do not review studies in this spirit (see, e.g., Levitt and Duggan, 2002), but rather focus on studies that entertain the idea that referees are influenced by nonmaterial social payoffs that arise in the decision…”
Lying to Level the Playing Field: Why People May Dishonestly Help or Hurt Others to Create Equity (2010, background): “Such incentives may be based on short-term gains, or may involve longer-term payoffs from reciprocity and relationship-building (Duggan and Levitt, 2002; Fehr and Gachter, 2000).”
Nationalism in Winter Sports Judging and its Lessons for Organizational Decision Making (2002, neutral): “…increase the amount of injury time when the home team is behind (Garicano, Palacios, and Prendergast, 2001), that sumo wrestlers throw matches to each other in response to non-linearities in incentives (Duggan and Levitt, 2000), and of point shaving in college basketball games (Wolfers, 2002).”
Do Hedge Fund Managers Misreport Returns? Evidence from the Pooled Distribution (2009, neutral): “Examples include the frequency of corporate earnings just below and just above zero (Burgstahler and Dichev (1997)), the winning percentage of sumo wrestlers in critical bouts (Duggan and Levitt (2002)), and the ability of management to sponsor shareholder resolutions that receive just enough votes ”