The authors analyze the effects of psychological pressure on performance using National Basketball Association (NBA) free throw data from the 2002-2003 through 2009-2010 seasons. The authors find evidence that players choke under pressure— they shoot on average 5-10 percentage points worse...

This paper empirically investigates three hypotheses regarding biases of National Basketball Association (NBA) referees. Identification of basketball referee bias is typically difficult as changes in observed statistics may be caused by either changes in referee bias or player behavior. We...

We analyze the effects of pressure on performance using National Basketball Association (NBA) free throw data from the 2002-03 through 2009-10 seasons. We find strong evidence that players choke under pressure – they shoot 5-10% worse than normal in the final seconds of very close games....