Fifty years on we examine two key propositions in Neale's (1964) "Peculiar Economics": the need for competitors in sport to have opponents of similar ability in order to earn large revenues and the effect of frequent changes sports leagues' standings on consumer demand. We develop a consumer...

We examine the relationship between college athletic scholarships and adolescent use of performance enhancing drugs. Annually, 4.5 million male high school athletes compete for about 132,000 athletic scholarships o_ered by NCAA Division I and II universities. Estimates from a probit model of...

We develop and empirically test a model of intercollegiate athletic department expenditure decisions. The model extends general dynamic models of nonprice competition and includes the idea that nonprofit athletic departments may simply set expenditure equal to revenues. Own and rival prestige is...

The relative standard deviation of win percentages, the most widely used measure of within-season competitive balance, has an upper bound which is very sensitive to variation in the numbers of teams and games played. Taking into account this upper bound provides additional insight into...

This paper develops a new simulation-based measure of playoff uncertainty and investigates its contribution to modelling match attendance compared to other variants of playoff uncertainty in the existing literature. A model of match attendance that incorporates match uncertainty, playoff...

This paper re-examines the calculation of the relative standard deviation (RSD) measure of competitive balance in leagues in which draws are possible outcomes. Some key conclusions emerging from the exchange between Cain and Haddock (2006) and Fort (2007) are reversed. There is no difference,...

Bonus point systems are a popular tournament design feature in some sports. We consider a bonus point system for the Australian Football League (AFL). In this paper, we utilise league points as a measure of team strength in a prediction model and choose the allocation of points to maximise...

Bonus points provide a simple way to improve the accuracy of league standings. We investigate the inclusion of bonuses in the National Football League (NFL) using a prediction model built on league points. Both touchdown-based and narrow-loss bonuses are shown to be significant. Our preferred...

Professional sports teams receive large public subsidies for new facility construction. Empirical research suggests that these subsidies cannot be justified by tangible or intangible economic benefits. We develop a model of bargaining between local governments and teams over subsidies that...

Appropriate measurement of competitive balance is a cornerstone of the economic analysis of professional sports leagues. We examine the distributional properties of the ratio of standard deviations (RSD) of points percentages, the most widely used measure of competitive balance in the sports...