This article focuses on the relationship between contract length and compensation in Major League Baseball. Because the best players receive both the highest salaries and the longest contracts, wage regressions that omit length can lead to misleading inferences. Although contract duration is...

The salaries of major league baseball players is a common subject for analysis in the sports economics literature. Although hitters and pitchers represent two separate groups, each of these two groups of players is assumed to be homogeneous so that aggregation within each group is appropriate....

Past work on principal-agent problems in sports does not effectively compare among players. The comparison must be made between players nearing contract negotiations and other players to detect ex ante strategic behavior (turning up performance just prior to contract negotiations) and ex post...

Outcome uncertainty, a fundamental principle associated with Rottenberg, has many meanings in the sports economics literature. In this article, the authors consider a type of within-season uncertainty termed "playoff uncertainty" (PLU). As with any type of within-season uncertainty, this concept...

In this paper, we focus on how rents are divided between an elite free agent and a team in a Nash bargaining framework. In order to find the Nash bargaining solution, we identify the threat points of the player and the team as the best alternative bargains that the player and the team could...

Women’s sports have received much less attention from economists than from other social scientists. This Handbook fills that gap with a comprehensive economic analysis of women’s sports. It also analyzes how the behavior and treatment of female athletes reflect broad economic forces.

A new interseasonal measure of competitive balance in a sports league is presented. It is based on a Markov model of a team’s probability of qualifying for postseason play given the performance of the team in the previous season. Transitional probabilities are estimated for Major League...

The author responds to an article in this edition by Bradbury (in press), which suggests that the free-market approach to estimating a player’s marginal revenue product (MRP) is limited. The author begins by reviewing a number of empirical issues that potentially limit the Scully...