Teaching competition in professional sports leagues

In recent years there has been some dispute over the appropriate way to model decision-making in professional sports leagues. In particular, Szymanski and Kesenne (2004), argue that formulating the decision-making problem as a noncooperative game leads to radically different conclusions about the nature of competition in sports leagues. This paper describes a simulation model that van be used in a classroom to demonstrate how competition works in a noncooperative context. The supporting Excel spreadsheet used to conduct the game can be downloaded from the author’s personal webpage http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/people/s.szymanski.