Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

First Advisor

Qi Ge

Abstract

There is an abundance of existing literature which shows the presence of behavioral biases in professional sports. Researchers have used reference dependent preferences and loss aversion, to explain athlete the behavior of professional golfers. Existing literature showed that par of the hole (Elmore and Urbaczewski, 2019), par of the round (Pope and Schweitzer, 2011) and par of the tournament (Stone and Arkes, 2016) have all been identified as reference points for professional golfers on the PGA tour. In this paper, I analyze a new sample of golfers: DIII college golfers. I use a 4 part analysis to examine whether the reference dependent preferences model can help explain the behavior and performance of DIII male college golfers. I hypothesized that there exists a single reference point for DIII golfers which is greater than par. Furthermore, I hypothesized that golfers exhibit loss aversion as they change their behavior relative to the reference point.

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