Incentive Effects in AsymmetricTournaments -Empirical Evidence from theGerman Hockey League

Following tournament theory, incentives will be rather low if the contestants ofa tournament are heterogeneous. We empirically test this prediction using alarge dataset from the German Hockey League. Our results show that indeed theintensity of a game is lower if the teams are more heterogeneous. This effect canbe observed for the game as a whole as well as for the first and last third. Whendividing the teams in the dataset into favorites and underdogs, we only observea reduction of effort provision from favorite teams. As the number of gamesper team changes between different seasons, we can also investigate the effect ofa changing spread between winner and loser prize. In line with theory, teamsreduce effort if the spread declines. Interestingly, effort is also sensitive to thetotal number of teams in the league even if the price spread remains unchanged.[...]