League-winning percentage Gini coefficients have seen recent use as measurements of within-season competitive balance in Major League Baseball. The authors demonstrate that the zero-sum nature of league play renders past estimates inappropriate. Adjusted for league play, Gini coefficients reveal...

Organized African American baseball (AAB), the longest lived rival to Major League Baseball (MLB) in history, thrived from the 1920s through the early 1940s. Although integration in 1947 focused attention on MLB and the American experience, the impact on AAB receives only passing, somewhat...

There is a growing literature investigating fan discrimination revealed in markets for sports memorabilia. Such estimates miss the mark for two reasons. First, simply measuring race as a binary variable may be less insightful than an alternative measure. Second, although it is the race...

This paper attempts to resolve some of the confusion in the sports economics literature regarding conjectures, open and closed leagues, and the invariance principle in sports league modeling. Very few papers model talent level and talent investment by teams separately, which can create confusion...

From historical odds Cain and Haddock assign the probability of a tie at 25% and offer functional forms for the standard deviation of a league with equal chances of a win for each team under different point assignment schemes. They then track the ratio of actual to these idealized standard...

If a sports time series, such as attendance, is nonstationary, then the use of level data (e.g., demand estimation using panel data) leads to biased estimates, and the direction of the bias is unknown. In past works, authors have failed to reject nonstationary data, taken first differences, and...

The authors extend the theory of optimal competitive balance to leagues where single-game ticket sales dominate revenues. Whether a planner that maximizes the sum of fan and owner surpluses prefers more balance or less in such a league depends on the relative magnitude of marginal consumers'...

This paper provides an introduction to the special edition as well as my contribution on the topics covered in this special edition---observation, replication, and measurement issues relevant to sports economists. The papers cover issues related to the professional conveyance of first-hand...

Rottenberg’s “The Baseball Players’ Labor Market†holds the original ideas behind many threads of the sports economics literature. Most well known, the article contains both the invariance proposition (IP) and the uncertainty-of-outcome hypothesis. But there is also a...