Blind as a Bat or Eyes Like a Hawk : Do Additional Referees Deter Crime on the Court?

McCormick and Tollison's (1984) analysis of the ACC Basketball Tournament offers strong evidence in favor of the deterrence model of crime. They find that a 50 percent increase in the number of referees lead to a 34 percent decrease in the number of fouls called. We collect two new sets of ACC basketball data and correct an error in McCormick and Tollison's original data. In each case we find that the increase in the number of referees does not affect the number of fouls called. Because these new results neither support nor reject the deterrence model, we examine several indirect tests to see if the increase in referees did indeed deter crime