We examine the need for and the presence of competitive balance in professional sports leagues. We argue that competitive balance helps to further fan welfare and we propose a new measure of competitive balance that hopefully better reflects the needs of fans—that is, compared with measures...

The present paper examines aggregate player movement in Major League Baseball over the majority of the 20th century. Major League Baseball has been subject to numerous exogenous shocks across the period. For example, it has been subject to competition during the mid-1910s with the introduction...

In late 2011, at a time when other leagues such as the National Football League and the National Basketball Association had engaged in work stoppages, Major League Baseball owners and the MLB Players Association harmoniously agreed on a new five-year collective bargaining agreement. This article...

The unwillingness of team owners to share their data prohibits a direct assessment of the value of professional team sports ownership. But insights into that value can be gleaned from actual team sale prices. First, throughout the entire modern history of Major League Baseball (MLB), the average...

Competitive balance research partitions into two areas: analyzing sports policy and its effect on competitive balance and the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis. This paper examines the latter section. No formal analysis of the relationship between competitive balance and regular season average...

This study estimates Major League Baseball (MLB) player salaries for three distinct periods of time. The data from the first time period, 1961 through 1973, were collected in 1974, but analysis of that set has never been published. During that period the reserve clause was fully in effect. The...

Competitive balance is highly desired in professional sports leagues, yet measurement of the concept is not well established. The definition of firm/team goals in a professional sports league and its connection with competitive balance has typically been assumed rather than studied. Using fan...

Static microeconomic theory predicts that monopolists set prices in the elastic range of the demand curves for their products. However, for nearly thirty years, most of the empirical studies of sports-game attendance demand have failed to support this prediction. This paper shows that in a...

This study adds to our knowledge of the effects of mega-events like Super Bowls and Major League Baseball All-Star games by looking specifically at a long time-series of monthly sales tax revenues to assess the impact of these events on the host city’s revenue. The analysis indicates that...

Major League Baseball faced increased competition from radio broadcasts and improvements in motion pictures during the 1920s and 1930s. The "Roaring Twenties" were followed by the Great Depression. As social norms changed, some owners fought for the right to stage home games on Sundays. Owners...