The fairness of long and short penalty sequences in the ABBA format.

What is it about?

Compared to the conventional ABAB-format, sequential tournaments in the ABBA-format are supposed to be fair. Here, person A has the first shot, person B has the next two shots, then person A has two more shots and so on, alternating the role of the "first-mover". In a basketball free-throw field experiment with a low scoring rate, we find a second-mover advantage in short ABBA-games with four attempts each and no first- or second-mover advantage with ten attempts each. Player B seems to perceive a psychological advantage in short sequential competitions. Participants with higher locus of control show a perform worse in our experiment.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

To our knowledge, this is the first study on the ABBA-format that varies the length of the ABBA-sequence. This is important because most studies assume a fixed length of sequence, while in the real world, especially in the economic context, the length of sequential tournaments is not fixed.