Cliff Redford

Thanks David.

Yeah, so you can imagine that if you're one of the top players on a professional team and you recognize that your contract is substantially less than someone else maybe who is not the same level of star as you or at least not enough better to justify the difference

in their pay, then that certainly could be something that creates feelings of unfairness, inequity, where you might behave differently on the team if you're feeling like you're underappreciated relative to other teammates, maybe who have less value, at least in your eyes.

Yeah, that's a good question.

So because I'm I don't I don't study sports per se.

I'm a management professor.

And generally, the research that I do, I'm, I'm trying to apply it to kind of broad organizational situations.

But I'm a lifelong sports fan, specifically NBA.

And and I've done projects before.

This is my third publication using professional basketball data.

And, and so I was curious, I'm interested in team dynamics and I've done some things with compensation before specifically with the NBA.

And it was kind of an idea that, that I'd had with, with a couple of, uh, former students here.

Uh, my coauthors on this paper, Sean Parkinson and JT Bates, and we're all basketball fans.

And we were kind of curious, like, you know, what happens, what happens in a team if, if you feel like there is.

pay inequity like what is that how does that affect team performance so that was kind of we're all interested in sports and kind of curious about the question and the nba is a great context to test it because you've got real teams playing for real money real outcomes with really cool data that are tracked objectively so you can you can

It's better than surveys, I'll say that.

A lot of management research is done with surveys, and that's great.

But when you can actually look at behavior, it's pretty cool.

And so that's kind of how it started.

Yeah, well, a caveat that I'll give, of course, is that we had only access to behavioral data with these teams.