FED UP WITH watching professional golfers humble historic courses, tournament organisers have lengthened holes, dug deeper bunkers and grown thicker rough to make things harder. But traditionalists—and there are many—complain of vandalism to beloved venues. So what is a golf official to do?
Some change the par of the holes—the number of strokes a good golfer should need to complete a hole. Par allows a set number of shots to reach the green, and then two putts to sink the ball. For men, holes over 430 metres (470 yards) are typically assigned a par of five. Those between 230 and 430 metres are par four.
To make long holes seem trickier several courses have relabelled a par five as par four, so elite golfers over the years have played these holes as both. And that sets up an intriguing natural experiment. Did those golfers try harder when they played them as par fours? If so, they would be showing what behavioural economists call loss-aversion bias: working harder to cling to something they already have (their status as par players of that course) than they did to get it in the first place.
To find out, Ryan Elmore and Andrew Urbaczewski of the University of Denver looked at scores from the US Open, a major tournament. They focused on two holes—the second at Pebble Beach and the ninth at Oakmont. Both have been switched in the past from par five to par four. And both courses hosted the Open at least twice in the years before and after the switch.
The researchers’ analysis, posted on SSRN, a preprint site, is as startling as an alligator emerging from a water hazard. Unsurprisingly, players’ scores relative to par on these two holes got worse when they were par fours. But their absolute scores improved, by an average of a whole shot over a tournament (during which the golfers play the same course four times). That can be the difference between winning and losing. Scores on other holes did not change, so the improvement was not explained by generally better play, better equipment or better weather. It seems to have been caused by players trying to protect par.
That is not a rational response. Golfers play against each other, not the course. The player who takes the fewest shots wins. Individual performance against par is irrelevant—except that, apparently, it isn’t.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/04/27/how-hard-a-golf-hole-is-does-not-depend-solely-on-how-hard-it-is
2019-04-25 20:57:29Z
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