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...

This paper develops a contest model of a professional sports league in which clubs maximize a weighted sum of profits and wins (utility maximization). The model analyzes how more win-orientated behavior of certain clubs affects talent investments, competitive balance and club profits. Moreover,...

This paper outlines how the theory of contests is applied to professional team sports leagues. In the first part, we present the traditional Tullock contest and explain some basic properties of the equilibrium. We will then extend this static contest to a two-period model in order to analyze...

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...

Executive pay regulation is widely discussed as a measure to reduce financial mismanagement in corporations. We show that the professional team sports industry, the only industry with substantial experience in the regulation of compensation arrangements, provides valuable insights for the...

This paper outlines and compares the organizational structure of major sports leagues, explores the reasoning behind their formation, and derives implications for salary caps in European football. To understand why sports leagues have developed a specific organizational structure, one must take...

The release of players from a club to the national team often leads to a conflict concerning the duration of the players' stay with the national team. Based on a theoretical bargaining model, we examine whether intervention in this conflict by a governing body is desirable. We show that...

This paper develops a model of a professional sports league with network externalities by integrating the theory of two-sided markets into a contest model. In professional team sports, leagues function as a platform that enables sponsors to interact with fans. In these league-mediated...

This paper provides a game-theoretic model of a professional sports league and analyzes the effect of luxury taxes on competitive balance, club profits and social welfare. We show that a luxury tax increases aggregate salary payments in the league as well as produces a more balanced league....

This paper provides a contest model of a professional team sports league and analyzes the impact of a restriction on foreign players. It shows that a league with binding restrictions on foreign talent for all clubs is more balanced than a league without binding restrictions on foreign talent....