Consequences of Performance-Enhancing Misconduct: Insights from Professional Road Cycling, 2000–2010

We explore the career consequences experienced by professional cyclists implicated in performance-enhancing drug use as well the spillover effects experienced by their teammates and managers using a data set that observes members of all teams from 2000 to 2011. Our data captures publicly known doping implications that range from informal suspicions published in the media to formal convictions by antidoping and law enforcement authorities. Our unique setting, characterized by expectations of widespread doping despite a rigorous antidoping regulatory regime and close media scrutiny, provides a new perspective on the multilayered ways that actors in competitive industries assess the competing demands of extreme performance pressures versus playing by the rules. We find that only the most severe rules violations are associated with career interruptions for riders, whereas lesser offenses are not. More ambiguous cases of doping, those based on informal suspicion or moderately punished formal convictions, are associated with career interruptions primarily for the sport’s high-performing stars. In contrast to most prior work on spillover effects from peer misconduct, we find that most riders are at a lower risk of career interruptions following teammates’ doping convictions—an effect we attribute to a vetting process in which regulators proactively target peers for increased monitoring, which resolves uncertainties about peers’ doping. Regarding spillover effects on managers’ careers, we find that only extreme levels of formal convictions that signal major team scandals are associated with increased risk of managerial career interruptions. Together, our results suggest an industry-level incentive structure that supports widespread misconduct in a competitive industry despite rigorous monitoring and enforcement. This paper was accepted by Lamar Pierce, organizations. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.03681 .