Tilting the Playing Field (Why a sports league planner would choose less, not more, competitive balance): The case of English Football

It has traditionally been argued that the organizer of a sports league would prefer more competitive balance to the level that emerges in a noncooperative equilibrium. This argument has been used to justify restraints on competition between teams, which also tend to raise profits at the expense of players and consumers. This paper shows that in theory a planner would prefer less, not more, competitive balance. The paper uses data from the second tier of professional English league football to show just how unbalanced a league planner would choose.competitive balance, sports leagues, football, soccer

Making Money Out of Football

In the US, most economists argue that professional sports teams are profit‐maximising businesses, but it is a widely held view in Europe that professional football clubs are not run on a profit‐maximising basis. This belief has important implications for the impact of widely‐advocated policy measures, such as revenue sharing. This paper looks at the performance of 16 English football clubs that acquired a stock exchange listing in the mid‐1990s. If the European story is true, we should have observed a shift toward profit‐maximising behaviour at these clubs, under the assumption that investors were attracted to these football clubs to earn a positive return. This paper finds no evidence of any shift in the behaviour of these 16 clubs after flotation. This result is consistent with the view that football clubs in England have been much more oriented toward profit objectives than is normally assumed.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110600/1/sjpe12065.pd

On Evaluation of Document Classification using RVL-CDIP

The RVL-CDIP benchmark is widely used for measuring performance on the task of document classification. Despite its widespread use, we reveal several undesirable characteristics of the RVL-CDIP benchmark. These include (1) substantial amounts of label noise, which we estimate to be 8.1% (ranging between 1.6% to 16.9% per document category); (2) presence of many ambiguous or multi-label documents; (3) a large overlap between test and train splits, which can inflate model performance metrics; and (4) presence of sensitive personally-identifiable information like US Social Security numbers (SSNs). We argue that there is a risk in using RVL-CDIP for benchmarking document classifiers, as its limited scope, presence of errors (state-of-the-art models now achieve accuracy error rates that are within our estimated label error rate), and lack of diversity make it less than ideal for benchmarking. We further advocate for the creation of a new document classification benchmark, and provide recommendations for what characteristics such a resource should include.Comment: EACL 202

Ups and Downs: The Affective Consequences of Power in Different Contexts

Power dictates the allocation of, and access to, valued resources. It is perhaps not surprising then that people have a 'will' or 'lust' for power (Nietzsche, 1924; Russel, 1938), and believe that power is exciting and powerlessness depressing (Mondillon et al., 2005). The Approach-Inhibition Theory of Power echoes this belief, suggesting that high power brings positive mood and low power negative mood (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003). However, empirical data on power and mood is mixed. Inducing feelings of power sometimes elevates mood (e.g., Galinsky, Gruenfeld, & Magee, 2003), but other times does not (e.g., Berdahl & Martorana, 2006), suggesting that the relationship between power and mood may be more complex than initially thought. The Situated Model of Power argues that the relationship between power and mood is dependent on the context (Guinote, 2007a). In this view, power attunes people to the current situation, elevating mood in positive contexts and depressing mood in negative contexts. This implies that power increases variability in mood between contexts of opposing valence (negative vs. positive; Guinote, 2007a), and is consistent with the fact that power increases variability in thought and behaviour (Guinote, Judd, & Brauer, 2002). Five studies, informed by the Approach-Inhibition (Keltner et al., 2003) and Situated (Guinote, 2007a) Models of Power, looked at the impact of high and low power on self-reports, and physiological indices, of mood at baseline and in contexts of differing valence (negative vs. positive). A meta-analysis revealed that across studies (N = 1046) high power elevated, and low power depressed mood at baseline/in neutral and in positive contexts. However, neither high nor low power predicted mood in negative contexts. Furthermore, high power increased, and low power decreased variability in mood across contexts (although the former effect was marginally significant). Results reconcile disparate findings and are discussed in relation to theoretical models of power

When is it wrong to eat animals? The relevance of different animal traits and behaviours

Research suggests that animals’ capacity for agency, experience, and benevolence predict beliefs about their moral treatment. Four studies built on this work by examining how fine‐grained information about animals’ traits and behaviours (e.g., can store food for later vs. can use tools) shifted moral beliefs about eating and harming animals. The information that most strongly affected moral beliefs was related to secondary emotions (e.g., can feel nostalgia), morality (e.g., will share food with others), empathy (e.g., can feel others pain), social connections (e.g., will look for deceased family members), and moral patiency (e.g., can feel pain). In addition, information affected moral judgements in line with how it affected superordinate representations about animals’ capacity for experience/feeling but not agency/thinking. The results provide a fine‐grained outline of how, and why, information about animals’ traits and behaviours informs moral judgements

M A K I N G M O N E Y O U T O F F O O T B A L L

ABSTRACT In the US, most economists argue that professional sports teams are profit-maximising businesses, but it is a widely held view in Europe that professional football clubs are not run on a profit-maximising basis. This belief has important implications for the impact of widely-advocated policy measures, such as revenue sharing. This paper looks at the performance of 16 English football clubs that acquired a stock exchange listing in the mid-1990s. If the European story is true, we should have observed a shift toward profit-maximising behaviour at these clubs, under the assumption that investors were attracted to these football clubs to earn a positive return. This paper finds no evidence of any shift in the behaviour of these 16 clubs after flotation. This result is consistent with the view that football clubs in England have been much more oriented toward profit objectives than is normally assumed

Groundwater flow paths drive longitudinal patterns of stream dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations in boreal landscapes

Preferential groundwater flow paths can influence dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration and export in the fluvial network because they facilitate the inflow of terrestrial DOC from large upslope contributing areas to discrete sections of the stream, referred to as discrete riparian inflow points (DRIPs). However, the mechanisms by which DRIPs influence longitudinal patterns of stream DOC concentrations are still poorly understood. In this study, we ask how DRIPs affect longitudinal patterns of stream DOC concentrations under different hydrologic conditions, as they can simultaneously act as major sources of terrestrial DOC and important locations for in-stream processes. To answer this question, we tested four model structures that account for different representations of hydrology (distributed inflows of DRIPs vs. diffuse groundwater inflow) and in-stream processes (no DOC uptake vs. in-stream DOC uptake downstream of DRIPs) to simulate stream DOC concentrations along a 1.5 km headwater reach for 14 sampling campaigns with flow conditions ranging from droughts to floods. Despite the magnitude and longitudinal patterns of stream DOC concentration varying across campaigns, at least one model structure was able to capture longitudinal trends during each campaign. Specifically, our results showed that during snowmelt periods or high-flow conditions (> 50 L s(-1)), accounting for distributed inputs of DRIPs improved simulations of stream DOC concentrations along the reach, because groundwater inputs from DRIPs diluted the DOC in transport. Moreover, accounting for in-stream DOC uptake immediately downstream of DRIPs improved simulations during five sampling campaigns that were performed during spring and summer, indicating that these locations served as a resource of DOC for aquatic biota. These results show that the role of DRIPs in modulating DOC concentration, cycling, and export varies over time and depends strongly on catchment hydrology. Therefore, accounting for DRIPs can improve stream biogeochemistry frameworks and help inform management of riparian areas under current and future climatic conditions

Word embeddings reveal growing moral concern for people, animals, and the environment

The Enlightenment idea of historical moral progress asserts that civil societies become more moral over time. This is often understood as an expanding moral circle and is argued to be tightly linked with language use, with some suggesting that shifts in how we express concern for others can be considered an important indicator of moral progress. Our research explores these notions by examining historical trends in natural language use during the 19th and 20th centuries. We found that the associations between words denoting moral concern and words referring to people, animals, and the environment grew stronger over time. The findings support widely-held views about the nature of moral progress by showing that language has changed in a way that reflects greater concern for others

The ‘me’ in meat: Does affirming the self make eating animals seem more morally wrong?

People typically extend limited moral standing to animals reared for food. Prominent perspectives in the literature on animal-human relations characterize this phenomenon as an outcome of moral disengagement: in other words, a strategy that protects people from moral self-condemnation. To provide a direct test of this hypothesis, we exposed people to a self-affirmation manipulation, and hypothesized that this would lead them to be more critical of their own meat eating and be more appreciative of animals’ minds and suffering. Three experiments tested this idea in meat-eaters from the United Kingdom. Two initial experiments (n = 244, n = 247) found that affirming the self made eating animals seem more morally wrong. However, a subsequent pre-registered experiment (n = 719) failed to replicate this effect. In addition, this experiment found no effects of the affirmationprocedure on specific beliefs about eating animals that participants consume compared to animals they do not consume. A mini-meta analysis of all the experiments found only weak evidence in support of the idea that affirming the self makes eating meat seem more morally wrong. There was no evidence that the affirmation procedure affected beliefs about animal minds