Cliff Redford

And so we didn't have access to player perceptions.

But we could see that behavior corresponded with theoretical expectations.

And so what we expected based on equity theory is that we would see when there were

pay disparities with the top players on a team, what we call the strategic core.

When there's these pay disparities, we expected that there might be differences in levels of effort, levels of cooperation among the team as a whole, and that this would influence team performance.

Yes.

Yeah.

So the way that we measured cooperation, or we call it coordination, was using defensive efficiency.

And our justification for that, again, we're sort of basketball geeks, was that this is like the best...

indicator in professional basketball of cooperation you might think and reviewers argued with us about this like oh well what about assists and stuff on offense which is something but um but for a team to truly be affected defensively you have to coordinate effectively you have to work together and so you can't have one person dominate on defense like you can one person on offense

And so, yeah, we looked at defensive efficiency because if a team is more efficient defensively, then this definitely suggests that they are working together as a team to prevent their opponents from scoring.

Yeah.

So that's an interesting question because certainly in the NBA, and that would be, you know, a limitation that we would mention.

We did mention in the paper that their pay is more transparent than your typical, you know, office situation or whatever.

And that certainly can accentuate the effects that we were looking at.

But

People find out.

People are curious.

People get a sense.

Someone sat in a hiring meeting or something, and they get a sense for what people are being paid, even if it's not exact.