The NCAA wants an antitrust exemption from Congress so it can oversee name, image and likeness deals

See The NCAA’s Athlete Endorsement Plan Comes With a Long-Shot Demand by Laine Higgins and Louise Radnofsky of The WSJ.

This is related to last week's post NCAA Takes Another Court Hit on Athlete Compensation: The Ninth Circuit ruled that the organization’s restrictions violated federal antitrust law.

The NCAA still has rules against schools directly paying players. But players will be able to make money selling autographs, for example. One concern is that a player could go to an autograph show, and the organizers could pay them alot of money that is actually coming from their school. The NCAA wants to review such deals and limit what can get paid. But that sounds like an agreement among competitors to control prices.

Excerpts from the article:

"The NCAA has also said it would require athletes to disclose the terms of their endorsements deals via a clearinghouse that could be run by the NCAA, university compliance officials or a third party. Big East commissioner Val Ackerman, co-chair of the NCAA working group charged with creating the new plan, said the group hadn’t decided who might oversee the mechanism and whether it will be able to void a deal deemed excessive or corrupt.

“There was a desire to see what the market was saying so that if you did see something that was really extreme you would at least have a mechanism to take a look at that and pick out the red flags,” said Ackerman.

What recourse the NCAA would have to deal with those “red flags” is unclear. Ackerman suggested that the divisions could institute payment “gradations” that correspond to particular third-party income opportunities to make sure that “transactions are legitimate and don’t morph into payment that looks like disguised payment from the school to play college sports.” 

For instance, a volleyball player could make $500 for signing autographs at an event put on by a campus pizza shop, but perhaps not $500,000.

Antitrust experts say that introducing a clearinghouse with clearly defined compensation tiers could amount to price fixing, no matter if it is run by an independent entity or the NCAA."

"Ackerman’s working group suggested the NCAA Board of Governors solve its problem with a “safe harbor” exemption from antitrust law from Congress. Unfortunately for the NCAA, some of the lawmakers most interested in how it operates think that is a terrible idea.

“There is no way I would consider giving a blanket antitrust exemption in exchange for an incredibly limited compensation right for college athletes around name, image and likeness. It’s a non-starter,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat."

Arming Women for the Dating Battlefield

Reddit’s Female Dating Strategy forum offers honesty and tough love in a treacherous online world

By Christine Rosen. She is a is senior writer at Commentary and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia.

If dating is a market, maybe services like this make the market more efficient. So "buyers" and "sellers" might be more likely to get what they want.

But first, let's hear from a famous psychologist:



Now some excerpts from the article:

"Enter Reddit, the self-described “front page of the internet,” which hosts more than a million discussion forums, including one devoted to Female Dating Strategy (FDS). With some 50,000 members, FDS is billed as “the first and only all-women dating subreddit,” where participants anonymously “discuss effective dating strategies for women who want to take control of their dating lives.”"

"Newcomers are encouraged to read the extensive FDS Handbook, which includes principles such as “Be a High-Value Woman,” “Don’t Have Sex Before Commitment” and “We Have the Responsibility to Be Ruthless in Our Evaluation of Men.” Although the last principle sounds harsh, it’s actually practical advice in the age of dating apps. Today’s Tinderella must swipe through a lot of ugly profiles to find her prince. “We do ourselves and humanity no favors allowing men to exhibit subpar behavior and be rewarded with our attention. Thus, be ruthless in cutting off men who add no value to your life,” the FDS Handbook states."

"the site distinguishes between “low-value men” (LVM) and “high-value men” (HVM). LVMs do things like lie about wanting a serious relationship when they only want sex (“future-faking”), refuse to make an effort to plan proper dates or are simply not financially independent, responsible adults."

"There might be a lot of LVMs, according to Female Dating Strategy, but there are also far too many women willing to tolerate bad behavior from them."

"The strategies that FDSers endorse, particularly for online dating, are backed by scientific research. In a 2010 study in the journal Computer Science by the data scientist Andrew Fiore and colleagues, women were found to be more selective than men when it comes to assessing potential suitors and more distrustful of men who didn’t respect the preferences that women stated for a match. But choosing wisely based on what someone’s profile says about them isn’t easy. Everyone lies: The Cornell University communications researchers Catalina Toma and Jeffrey Hancock found that men tend to lie about their height and women about their weight. Everyone is offering only selective disclosures about themselves.

That turns out to be a rational strategy. A 2007 study by Michael Norton, Jeana Frost and Dan Ariely in the Journal of Personal and Social Psychology found that when it comes to online dating, “although people believe that learning more about others leads to greater liking, more information about others leads, on average, to less liking.” In other words, the more ambiguous a person’s profile is, the more likely it is that interested potential matches will have to fill in the blanks with their best guesses."

Related posts:

Is It Okay To Use An App To Bribe Someone Into Going On A Date?

Who wrote your potential love's online dating profile? (maybe they outsourced it to a professional who specializes in that) 

When Women Earn More Than Men, Is Dating Affected?

Who Pays on the First Date? No One Knows Anymore, and It’s Really Awkward

Can Giving Up Money And Material Things Lead To More Love?

Can You Put A Price Tag On Love?

Do Opposites Attract? Not Usually, Except Maybe When It Comes To Money

eHarmony To Provide Personal Counselors To Help You Find Mr. Or Ms. Right

Do Women Really Value Income over Looks in a Mate? by Marina Adshade