Competitive Balance vs. Incentives to Win: A Theoretical Analysis of Revenue Sharing

We analyze a dynamic model of strategic interaction between the league organizing a professional sport, the teams playing the tournament organized by this league, and broadcasters competing for the rights to televise their matches. Teams and broadcasters maximize expected profits, while the league's objective may be either to maximize the demand for the sport or to maximize the teams' joint profits. Demand depends positively on competitive balance among teams and how intensively they compete to win the tournament. Revenue sharing increases competitive balance but decreases incentives to win. Under demand maximization, a performance-based reward scheme (as used by European top soccer leagues for national TV deals) may be optimal. Under joint profit maximization, full revenue sharing (as used by US team sport leagues for national TV deals) is always optimal.

Revenue sharing in professional sports leagues: for the sake of competitive balance or as a result of monopsony power?

We analyze the distribution of broadcasting revenues by sports leagues. In the context of an isolated league, we show that when the teams engage in competitive bidding to attract talent, the league's optimal choice is full revenue sharing (resulting in full competitive balance) even if the revenues are independent of the level of balancedness. This result is overturned when the league has no monopsony power in the talent market. When the teams of two different leagues bid for talent, the equilibrium level of revenue sharing is bounded away from sharing of revenues: leagues choose a performance-based reward scheme. Finally, we argue that our model explains the observed differences in revenue sharing rules used by the U.S. sports leagues (full revenue sharing) and European soccer leagues (performance-based reward).

The Sport League's Dilemma: Competitive Balance versus Incentives to Win

We analyze a dynamic model of strategic interaction between a professional sport league that organizes a tournament, the teams competing to win it, and the broadcasters paying for the rights to televise it. Teams and broadcasters maximize expected profits, while the league's objective may be either to maximize the demand for the sport or to maximize the teams' joint profits. Demand depends positively on symmetry among teams (competitive balance) and how aggressively teams try to win (incentives to win). Revenue sharing increases competitive balance but decreases incentives to win. Under demand maximization, a performance-based reward scheme (used by European sport leagues) may be optimal. Under joint profit maximization, full revenue sharing (used by many US leagues) is always optimal. These results reflect institutional differences among European and American sports leagues.

Inter-league competition for talent vs. competitive balance

We analyze the distribution of broadcasting revenues by sports leagues. We show that when the teams engage in competitive bidding to attract talent in an isolated league, the league’s optimal choice is full revenue sharing (resulting in full competitive balance). In contrast, when the teams of several leagues bid for talent, in equilibrium the leagues choose a performance-based reward scheme. We thus provide an explanation for the differences in revenue sharing rules for national TV rights used by the U.S. sports leagues (full revenue sharing) and European football leagues (performance-based reward).Sports league, revenue sharing, competitive balance.

Skill, Strategy, and Passion: an Empirical Analysis of Soccer

Sports provide a natural experiment on individual choices in games with high stakes. We study soccer with a game-theoretic model of a match, and then evaluate the ability of this model to explain actual behavior with data from 2885 matches among professional teams. In our model, the strategy of a team depends on the current state of the game. When the game is tied, both teams attack. A losing team always attacks, while its winning opponent attacks early in the game, but it starts defending as the end of the match nears. We find that teams' skills, current score, and home field advantage are significant explanatory variables of the probability of scoring. We also find that a team which falls behind is relatively more likely to score. A team which is ahead, on the other hand, uses a conservative strategy very early in the match. These results support the main conclusions of our model. They indicate that soccer teams behave consistently with rationality and equilibrium. However, there is significant evidence that emotional factors are roughly as important as rational ones in determining the game's outcome, and they affect the strategic decisions of teams.

Should smart investors buy funds with high returnsin the past?

Newspapers and weekly magazines catering to the investing crowd often rank funds according to the returns generated in the past. Aside from satisfying sheer curiosity, these numbers are probably also the basis on which investors pick a fund to invest in. In this article, we fully characterize the equilibrium in a game between a mutual fund manager of unknown ability who controls the riskiness of his portfolio and investors who only observe realized returns. We derive conditions under which (i) investors invest in the fund if the realized return falls within some interval, i.e., is neither too low nor too high, (ii) an informed fund manager picks a portfolio of minimal riskiness and (iii) an uninformed mutual fund manager will pick a portfolio with higher risk, “gambling” on a lucky outcome, (iv), when the fee structure is endogenous, both types of manager choose the same fraction-of-fund fee structure. Our results are consistent with empirical evidence about the lack of persistence of top performance, and about the very wide use of fraction-of-fund fee structure among mutual funds

Speculation and market selection with imperfect competition

Defence date: 29 October 1994Examining board: Prof. Alan Kirman, E.U.I., supervisor ; Prof. Pierre-Marie Larnac, Université Paris Dauphine ; Prof. Andrei Shleifer, Harvard University ; Prof. Xavier Vives, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona ; Prof. Robert Waldmann, E.U.I., co-supervisorPDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 201

Noise trading in small markets

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020