You may be familiar with the stream of research that examines NASCAR
stock-car racing as a laboratory of business strategy, particularly
regarding issues of competition and cooperation. This week the online
magazine Slate posted an article that is short and very readable on this
topic. It could provide the basis for an interesting discussion with
students regarding business strategy, competition and cooperation, game
theory, and so forth.
Here is the URL for the short Slate article.
"Fortune 500, Meet Daytona 500 - - What NASCAR can teach us about
business"
http://slate.msn.com/id/2078672/
A previous, lengthy treatment of the topic by David Ronfeldt, a senior
research scientist at RAND Corporation, is also available online.
"Social Science at 190 MPH on NASCAR's Biggest Superspeedways"
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_2/ronfeldt/index.html
Abstract: In aerodynamically intense stock-car races like the Daytona
500, the drivers form into multi-car draft lines to gain extra speed. A
driver who does not enter a draft line (slipstream) will lose. Once in a
line, a driver must attract a drafting partner in order to break out and
try to get further ahead. Thus the effort to win leads to ever-shifting
patterns of cooperation and competition among rivals. This provides a
curious laboratory for several social science theories: (1) complexity
theory, since the racers self-organize into structures that oscillate
between order and chaos; (2) social network analysis, since draft lines
are line networks whose organization depends on a driver's social
capital as well as his human capital; and (3) game theory, since racers
face a "prisoner's dilemma" in seeking drafting partners who will not
defect and leave them stranded. Perhaps draft lines and related "bump
and run" tactics amount to a little-recognized dynamic of everyday life,
including in structures evolving on the Internet.
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Shane J. Schvaneveldt, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Management
Goddard School of Business and Economics
Weber State University
Ogden, Utah 84408-3802 USA
Email:
schvaneveldt@weber.edu