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...

Tourism sector is playing an important role in the development of a region, contributing to the economy growth and job creation. Despite of the actual crisis, Tourism activities continues to growth in the last year (UNWTO 2011). Also, Spain maintains in the better positions of the world ranking....

Abstract Tourism has been considered as an instrument for urban and regional 'development' policies for many countries, especially for cities/urban areas. Cities are themselves among the important destinations. They offer many touristic attractions together and tourism facilities become a more...

Improvement of transportation has contributed to tourism expansion. Indeed tourism implies mobility and mobility needs transportation. Furthermore, transportation links the various destinations and people, goods, and services. The link between HSR services and tourism has been investigated only...

Shirakami Mountain Range has the largest primeval forest in the world, and has some public functions; the biodiversity function, the water resource cultivation function, the health and recreation function and so on. This study tries to measure its environmental economic value by using the travel...

The paper aims at analysing the impact of domestic and international tourism on the economic growth process for 179 regions in ten European countries, which are highly representative of total tourism flows. The econometric analysis is carried out for the period 1999-2009 and it is based on a...