Peer Effects in Team Sports: Empirical Evidence From NCAA Relay Teams

This article investigates whether peer effects manifest in the performance of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) 4 x 400 m men's relay teams. We test whether increasing the average quality of team members has a nonlinear and ultimately deleterious impact on team performance, measured by, relay time. Using both absolute and relative performance measures we find that increasing average team member quality improves team performance but at a decreasing rate. The authors attribute these diminishing returns to negative peer effects after finding that relay teams comprised of higher quality runners are more likely to underperform relative to their predicted quality.