Cooperation, association, and contest1

Contest in sport occurs when at least two units (individuals or teams) compete under specific rules and agreements, for superiority in a nonrepresentative skill or strategy. The competitors are defined as equal at the begin-ning of the contest, and unequal at the end: one is the winner or gets the higher rank. In regard to the reward, which can be set by an outside party or organization as well as by the opponents themselves, a sport contest is a zero-sum game-what one side wins, the other loses. The reward ranges from a very low payoff in the form of recognition in a play group to a high payoff, e.g., prestige, or money in professional sports. At this point I do not want to open up a conceptual discussion whether a sport contest should be regarded as conflict or competition. While a broad conception of conflict would also include a sport contest, on a more limited basis one might point to the fact that a sport contest has a highly regulated formal struc-ture, an agreed-upon outcome within a mutu-ally accepted order, whereas this is not neces-sarily so in other forms of conflict (cf. Coser, 1956). A legal conflict or a war is by and large final after a settlement, whereas a sport contest settles a rivalry or championship only for a certain period of time; it is in a way ’Paper originally delivered at the AAAS Meet