The allocation of rewards in athletic contests

Similar to most top-tier matches in professional basketball, baseball and soccer, high-level competitions in individualistic sports, such as the tennis tournaments of Wimble-don and Flushing Meadows, the golf tournaments of Augusta and St. Andrews, as well as the marathons of New York and London attract not only thousands of spectators, but also a TV audience of millions of fans. Moreover, these (and other) individualistic sports have recently received increased attention also from economists trying to test a number of hypotheses that can be derived from "tournament theory" or - as a synonym - from "contest theory". The chapter is structured as follows: We first provide a brief description of the development of prize money levels and structures in the three different individual sports men-tioned in the previous paragraph (and, consequently, athletes' incomes over the last years (section 2). We then summarize the basic insights and the core predictions of tour-nament/contest theory (section 3) and review the available literature on the incentive effects of tournament pay systems in athletic contests (section 4). Finally, section 5 concludes and raises some of the questions that have not been answered yet and that should, therefore, be dealt with in future research.

Market size and attendance in English Premier League football

This paper models the impacts of market size and team competition for fan base on matchday attendance in the English Premier League over the period 1997-2004 using a large panel data set. We construct a comprehensive set of control variables and use tobit estimation to overcome the problems caused by sell-out crowds. We also account for unobserved influences on attendance by means of random effects attached to home teams. Our treatment of market size, with its use of Geographical Information System techniques, is more sophisticated than in previous attendance demand studies.

The impact of managerial quality on organizational performance: evidence from German soccer

Although a considerable literature exists on the determinants of managerial compensation, much of it focussing on the role of incentives, there is much less known about the impact of managerial remuneration and quality upon attainment of organizational goals. In this paper we apply two distinct econometric methods to panel data on head coach quality and team performance in Germany?s premier soccer league. We find that, given a particular amount of spending on players relative to the rest of the league, a team that hires a better quality head coach can expect to achieve improved performance.

A tale of two audiences: spectators, television viewers and outcome uncertainty in Spanish football

This paper tests for the impact of match outcome uncertainty on two types of audience for Spanish football, fans at the stadium and television viewers. We find that fans inside the stadium prefer games that are less and not more likely to finish with a close score. This is contrary to much theoretical literature in sports economics which argues that fans prefer close contests and imposes this assumption in formal modelling. We also find that television viewers prefer close contests to more predictable contests. The different preferences of fans inside the stadium and television viewers need to be reconciled by the league when considering the effectiveness of policies to redistribute resources amongst teams in the league. We use our empirical model to consider how this tension might be resolved so as to maximise total audience and total league revenues.

Robust estimates of the impact of broadcasting on match attendance in football

The paper employs data from 2,884 matches, of which 158 were televised, in the second tier of English football (currently known as The Football League Championship). It builds a model of the determinants of attendance that is designed to yield estimates of the proportionate changes in the size of crowds resulting from games being shown on either free-to-air or subscription based channels. The model has two innovatory features. First, it controls for the market size of home and away teams very precisely by including local population measures constructed from the application of GIS software and information on competition from other clubs. Second, it employs the Hausman-Taylor random effects estimator in order to take explicit account of the endogeneity of the television coverage variable and of other variables typically included in earlier studies based on ordinary least squares or fixed effects models of attendance. The Hausman-Taylor estimates of the impact of broadcasting are greater than those reported in such studies. In the case of free-to-air television, the negative impact is estimated as over 20 percent but for subscription television, which carried most of the transmissions, the negative effect was only of the order of 5 percent

Freedom of entry, market size and competitive outcome: evidence from English soccer

The paper tests, in the context of an open sports league, whether greater success is achieved by clubs in markets with larger populations. The relationship is strong but, to a limited extent, mitigated by more clubs establishing in large markets.

Outcome uncertainty and the couch potato audience

Previous studies of attendance demand for professional team sports have failed to yield clear- cut findings on the importance of outcome uncertainty to consumers. But potentially fewer problems should arise in examining the link between outcome uncertainty and demand in the television market for team sports, which in the case of English Premier League football is in fact a more important component in total club revenue. This study models both the choice of which games to show and the size of audience attracted by each game, exploiting data on audience sizes for games between 1993 and 2002. We propose a new measure of match outcome uncertainty and, from our results, both the broadcaster and the audience appear interested in competitive balance.

Do Salaries Improve Worker Performance?

We establish the effects of salaries on worker performance by exploiting a natural experiment in which some workers in a particular occupation (football referees) switch from short-term contracts to salaried contracts. Worker performance improves among those who move onto salaried contracts relative to those who do not. The finding is robust to the introduction of worker fixed effects indicating that it is not driven by better workers being awarded salary contracts. Nor is it sensitive to workers sorting into or out of the profession. Improved performance could arise from the additional effort workers exert due to career concerns, the higher income associated with career contracts (an efficiency wage effect) or improvements in worker quality arising from off-the-job training which accompanies the salaried contracts.

Custodial Symmetry, Flavor Physics, and the Triviality Bound on the Higgs Mass

The triviality of the scalar sector of the standard one-doublet Higgs model implies that this model is only an effective low-energy theory valid below some cut-off scale Lambda. We show that the experimental constraint on the amount of custodial symmetry violation implies that the scale Lambda must be greater than of order 7.5 TeV. The underlying high-energy theory must also include flavor dynamics at a scale of order Lambda or greater in order to give rise to the different Yukawa couplings of the Higgs to ordinary fermions. This flavor dynamics will generically produce flavor-changing neutral currents. We show that the experimental constraints on the neutral D-meson mass difference imply that Lambda must be greater than of order 21 TeV. For theories defined about the infrared-stable Gaussian fixed-point, we estimate that this lower bound on Lambda yields an upper bound of approximately 460 GeV on the Higgs boson's mass, independent of the regulator chosen to define the theory. We also show that some regulator schemes, such as higher-derivative regulators, used to define the theory about a different fixed-point are particularly dangerous because an infinite number of custodial-isospin-violating operators become relevant.Comment: 15 pages, 7 ps/eps embedded figures, talk presented at the 1996 International Workshop on Perspectives of Strong Coupling Gauge Theories (SCGT 96), Nagoya, Japa