Many continue to express shock and disbelief that NBA players could turn down so much money just because they believe they are being treated unfairly.  They shouldn't be surprised at all.  It's a well-known phenomenon that there are points at which people value fairness more than they value money.

NBA players have had enough?

Swiss economist Ernst Fehr best illustrated this in an experiment called "The Ultimatum Game".  Any google search for the "ultimatum game" will reveal numerous variants and repitions of the experiment (game).  In the game, there are two players (let's call them David and Billy.  See what I did there?).  David is offered a sum of money (I'm tempted to say it's $4.2 billion, but let's keep the math easy and say it's ten bucks, just like in the experiment).  He must then divide the money any way he sees fit and then present Billy with his share of the money.  If Billy takes the money, they both keep the money and the game is over.  If Billy rejects the money, they must give the entire $10 back to the experimenter.  This is a ONE TIME offer (i.e. David cannot revise his offer if Billy rejects it).

What's interesting here is that if David offers Billy $5 (or more, obviously), Billy always excepts.  And in many cases David can even offer Billy less, and Billy's acceptance rate is still very high -- after all, it's free money and fate gave David the power to divide the money, not Billy.  This happens until you get to the point where David offers about $2 (or less, obv). As David's offer gets more and more "unfair" (i.e. the percentage that David offers Billy goes towards zero), an interesting thing happens: Billy starts rejecting the offer.

At first you might think that this is "obvious" and not "interesting". But let me point out something:  Billy's options are a) get zero or b) get whatever amount David offers, because if Billy rejects, David will have no chance to make a better offer according to the rules of the game.  So, no matter what David offers (as long as it isn't zero), Billy is ALWAYS losing money by rejecting the proposal.  In other words, from a purely rational standpoint, it always makes sense for David to make a paltry offer to Billy, and keep most of the money, and it always makes sense for Billy to accept the offer (even if it's insulting), because something is better than nothing.  Yet experimental results clearly show that when the Billies of the world deem the proposal unfair, they punish the Davids of the world by rejecting the offer (which, again, is at a cost to themselves).

Of course, the NBA negotiations aren't exactly like this experiment.  For one thing, the $10 aren't just offered up for free by a third party.  For another, they don't disappear when Billy reject's David's offer, but instead there is further negotiation (and/or legal action).  Further, there's no third-party experimenter laying down the rules (although this may change if things go to court).  But the same principles are absolutely at play;  there is a certain threshold of fairness that is improtant enough that the NBPA members might be willing to lose money in order to punish the owners for their unfair offer.  David Stern and the other owners, who have made fortunes negotiating business deals, would be foolish not to be aware of this phenomenon.

I've outed my opinion that the NBPA is not acting "rationally" here, and that at the end of the day they will lose more money with this course than they would have by accepting a bad deal (and also, by the way, that they should have striked the playoffs or de-certified earlier to counteract the asymetric nature of these negotiations -- owners are losing NET profits, players are losing GROSS salary payments, and this would not be true during the playoffs).  And @Miami_Heat_Index has accused me of calling players "stupid" for doing so.  My response has always been (and still is) that smart people make irrational choices all the time (like, possibly, this most recent one).  And it's possible time will prove me wrong, that the players will get treble damages for salaries missed during the lockout AND a better labor deal.  

But in any case I would never begrudge the players for fighting for what's theirs.  And make no mistake, the lion's share of economic rent from professional basketball would go to the players if we were really talking about what's "fair".