This paper provides a comparative analysis of the hospitality sector using the island of Sardinia and the autonomous province of Bolzano as a case study. The comparison holds its own interest since they are both tourism destinations, though characterised by different features as far as...

There are at least two reasons why multiple prizes can be optimal in symmetric imperfectly discriminating contests. First, the introduction of multiple prizes reduces the standard deviation of contestants’ effort in asymmetric equilibria, when the majority of contestants actively participate...

The relative standard deviation (RSD) measure of league parity is persistently higher for the National Basketball Association (NBA) than the other three major sports leagues in North America. This anomaly spans the last three decades and is not explained by differences in league distributions of...

Abstract: In the recent years, many clubs in the biggest European soccer leagues have run into debts. The sports economic literature provides several explanation for this development, e.g., the league structure (open versus closed league), club constitutions, ruinous rat races between clubs....

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, the competition of the clubs functions as a platform that enables sponsors to interact with fans. In these...

Third party money injections of benefactors (sugar daddies) function as a bailout mechanism for otherwise insolvent football clubs. The successful implementation of the new UEFA "financial fair play" regulations will abrogate this bailout mechanism. We develop a theoretical model of a...

The UEFA Champions League is an annual Pan-European football competition that takes place parallel to the domestic league competitions. The participation in the Champions League secures the teams large payments, which have steadily increased over the last decade. This paper develops a general...

This article examines the creation of the first professional athletic labor market restriction over a century ago. In 1879, professional baseball club owners mutually agreed that each could reserve five players whom the others would not sign without permission, justifying the action by claiming...

I investigate whether the removal of the reserve clause in professional baseball has affected the competitive nature of the industry in the context of whether teams are actively attempting to monopolize in high- valued inputs. It is possible that a very few teams could purchase all of the best...

A widely documented empirical regularity in gambling markets is that bets on high probability events (a race won by a ``favourite'') have higer expected returns than bets on low probability events (a ``longshot'' win). Such favourite-longshot (FL) biases however appear to be more severe and...