A medal share model for Olympic performance

A sizable empirical literature relates a nation's Olympic performance to socioeconomic factors by adopting linear regression or a Tobit approach suggested by Bernard and Busse (2004). We propose an alternative model where a nation's medal share depends on its competitiveness relative to other nations and the model is logically consistent. Empirical evidence shows that our model fits data better than the existing linear regression and Tobit model. Besides Olympic Games, the proposed model and its estimation method could also be similarly applied to other settings with competitions.