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Competing Against Superstars
by Zubin Jelveh
Jan 09, 2008
Jan 09, 2008
You're good at what you do, but not the best. In fact, you sometimes find yourself in direct competition with someone who happens to be leagues better than you are -- does this effect your performance?
Jennifer Brown, an economist at UC Berkeley argues that not only does your outcome change, but that it's lower than it would be without the presence of the superstar.
To reach her conclusion, Brown looked at scores for all golfers in PGA tournaments from 1999 to 2006. What's nice about this time frame is that it captures both the dominance, and temporary decline, of golf great Tiger Woods.
The chart below shows the strokes under par for top players in tournaments with and without Tiger Woods. (The higher the bar the better they did.)
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