Bounded Rationality and Heuristics: Do We Only Need to Score in Order to Win Individual Awards in Basketball?

Abstract

In the game of basketball game-related statistics are utilised to help decision makers to evaluate players’ achievements. Previous research showed that in the case of individual awards, points are preferred over other indicators of effectiveness. Based on recent studies and following Simon’s bounded rationality, in our interpretation, decision-makers decide on nominations at the post-grant level according to points scoring which is the easiest aspect to assess and the most familiar to them. In this context we also hypothesise that youth all-star players have better overall performance than their not selected teammates. To test our hypotheses we selected all of the youth awarded male players and their teammates from 2004 to 2019. In our sample, we examined n = 3198 player statistics. Two groups were created with nominated and not selected players. We used a two-sample t-test, and correlation matrix to examine the relationship between the variables (p < 0.001). We found that scoring is the most important selection criteria for decision-makers (r = 0.605; p = 0.000) and the selected players had significantly better individual statistics. An important finding of our study is that although efficiency (EFF) is used to measure the players’ contribution to the game, it is not the primary selection factor and should therefore be redefined.