Selection Consequences and Fatigue Disclosure in Competitive Team Sport

Abstract

An athlete’s fatigue response can affect access to support and selection for competition. This study determines when those consequences favour a response that corresponds to the athlete’s experienced concern. A binary decision model assigns state-dependent value to useful follow-up and explicit costs to selection loss, disclosure effort and loss of privacy. Accurate differentiation requires a positive advantage for a high-concern response when a concern is present and a negative advantage when it is absent. For a common support increment g and incremental cost K, the condition is B₀g < K < B₁g. With specified values B₁ = 6, B₀ = 2, g = 0.60 and K = 1.80, the two advantages are 1.80 and −0.60; the smaller preference margin is 0.60 utility units. Holding costs constant and reducing g to 0.05 makes a low-concern response preferable in both states. A separate response-probability calculation gives a decline in high-concern entries from 35% to 15% at unchanged concern prevalence and complete submission. Selective completion produces an additional change in the recorded distribution. The analysis identifies three management decisions that affect disclosure incentives: who receives the raw response, how useful follow-up is delivered, and whether selection consequences arise from assessed availability or an additional penalty for speaking up. Monitoring records require interpretation alongside these decisions and the pattern of missing responses.