Professional sports leagues have witnessed the appearance of so-called "sugar daddies" - people who invest enormous amounts of money into clubs and become their owners. This paper presents a contest model of a professional sports league that incorporates this phenomenon. We analyze how the...

The regulation of executive pay currently is a topic widely discussed in politics and the media. In this contribution we analyze a sector with a long tradition of pay regulation: professional team sports. We provide an analysis of the most important regulatory practices and their consequences on...

This paper develops a contest model to compare social welfare in homogeneous leagues in which all clubs maximize identical objective functions with mixed leagues in which clubs maximize different objective functions. We show that homogeneous leagues in which all clubs are profit-maximizers...

This paper presents a dynamic model of talent investments in a team sports league with an infinite time horizon. We show that the clubs' investment decisions and the effects of revenue sharing on competitive balance depend on the following three factors: (i) the cost function of talent...

Many major sports leagues are characterized by a combination of cross-subsidization mechanisms like revenue-sharing arrangements and payroll restrictions. Up to now, the effects of these policy tools have only been analyzed separately. This article provides a theoretical model of a team sports...

For football executives, understanding the determinants of spectator no-show behavior better is of utmost importance. Recent research efforts, however, have primarily focused on exploring the potential effects of determinants that the club management can hardly influence (e.g., potential...

The Covid-19 pandemic has induced worldwide natural experiments on the effects of crowds. We exploit one of these experiments currently taking place over several countries in almost identical settings: professional football matches played behind closed doors. We find large and statistically...

Because no-show behavior typically leads to operational inefficiencies and thus diminishing returns for service firms, a growing number of authors have demonstrated the potential of using reminders to reduce no-show rates. In this study, by examining the behavioral responses of 13,911 season...