Anchoring bias in the evaluation of basketball players: A closer look at NBA draft decision‐making

Abstract

The NBA installed the draft mechanism to fairly distribute young amateur players among its franchises. As this policy hinges on appropriate talent evaluation skills of the respective organizations, it can be considered a proxy for decision‐making under uncertainty. Such judgments are prone to fallacies and systemic mistakes. The article found the RSCI rank as a problematic metric, which is the source for systematic draft errors. It can be shown that in many cases, managers do not deviate enough from the pre‐draft rankings of players, leading to systematically over‐ and undervaluing certain groups of talents. This can be described as a decision‐quality‐lowering anchoring bias.

When crowding‐in and when crowding‐out? The boundary conditions on the relationship between negative online reviews and online sales

“…We employ regression methods to target the explanatory variables and verify whether they can explain the variance in the dependent variables. The process of our regressions is hierarchical in the logic that each step is conditional on the positive or negative outcome of the previous one (Berger & Daumann, 2021). Thus, hierarchical multiple regression was used to test the hypotheses.…”

Peer effects and human capital accumulation: Time spent in college and productivity in the National Basketball Association

“…Teams then started drafting more international players, and first‐round international picks then began to underperform. Berger and Daumann (2021) find that player high school rankings are an important factor in team draft decisions, but that such rankings do not predict NBA success when controlling for college performance.…”

Drafting strategies in fantasy football: A study of competitive sequential human decision making

“…An advantage of using fantasy league behavior data it is naturally occurring, and produced by motivated decision makers, rather than being subject to experimenter demands in a more controlled setting (Mummolo & Peterson, 2019;Orne, 1962;Weber & Cook, 1972;Zizzo, 2010). Previous studies of human decision making using draft behavior, although involving real rather than fantasy drafts, have emphasized this advantage (Berger & Daumann, 2021;Massey & Thaler, 2013).…”