The paper analyses the impact of the relatively belated move to professionalism in Rugby Union. We use data on match attendance for 3,667 fixtures in European club Rugby over 15 seasons to estimate the effect of competitive balance on attendance. We find that (short- and medium-term) competitive...

In the standard two-team model of professional league sports it is shown that if teams have different objectives (the maximization of, respectively, wins and profits) the competitive balance conditions get worse with respect to the case when teams share the same goal. A similar, though less...

The Formula One Championship (F1) is one of the biggest sports businesses in the world. But, however, it seems to astonish that only very few scholarly articles analyze the F1 business. The aim of this study is to contribute to closing two gaps in the existing literature: it contributes (1) to...

Individuals may respond differently to their own past performance than to their teammates' performance in a multi-battle competition. Using field data from professional squash team tournaments, we show that while previous individual success begets more success, teammates' past performance has...

This paper studies a novel explanation for observed productivity differences among firms in the same industry. Competition is allowed to affect labor productivity, so that heterogeneity in competition affects the demand for skilled labor, leading to differences in firm performance. This...

A club's market size is not equivalent to its fan-base because the club collects gate receipts from fans affiliated to rival clubs, and thus indirectly shares its revenue source with other clubs. We trace the spending of individual fans and found that clubs with a smaller fan-base benefits more...

This paper searches the differences in competitive balance and concentration ratios in economic terms in the Liga BBVA. The idea is to compare if income inequality is related to and increase competitive imbalance

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...

This paper analyzes data from a tournament, namely the National Hockey League regular scheduled season of games, which provides incentives to increase effort in order to reach the playoffs and incentives to decrease effort once a team has been eliminated from playoff considerations because of...

This paper analyzes issues associated with network effects and two-sidedness in the market for professional team sports. Teams in professional sports leagues have to compete both for players (inputs) and fans (consumers). In this setting, we construct a theoretical framework where fans are more...