This paper studies the relationship between talent disparity and team productivity based on panel data from German soccer teams. Holding average ability and unobserved team heterogeneity constant, we find evidence that the players selected to play on the competition team should be rather...

This paper analyzes the institutional setup of major league sports. In particular, it looks at reasons for the organization of leagues as cooperatives of team-owners, the specific employment relation of a commissioner as enforcement mechanism for rules of the league, and the centralized...

There is a well-established literature on separately testing the prediction power of different betting market settings. This paper provides an inter-market comparison of the forecasting accuracy between bookmakers and a major betting exchange. Employing a dataset covering all football matches...

Auf dem Markt für Informationen über feine Weine konnte sich Robert M. Parker eine dominante Stellung als sogenannter Weinkritiker aufbauen. Der vorgelegte Beitrag hat zum Ziel, die ökonomischen Mechanismen und „Geschäftsmodelle“ offen zu legen, die hinter Parkers Erfolg als Weinkritiker...

The analysis focuses on the basic institutional mechanisms governing open source software development. It explains why these institu-tional mechanisms enable rent-seeking without crowding out donative behavior. The “symbiotic” institutional arrangements translate into an ability to attract...

There is an on-going debate about the optimal degree of team solidarity in professional European soccer leagues. Support for a high degree of team solidarity has been coming from the theory of competitive balance, which states that diminished uncertainty of outcome will result in reduced...

We introduce agency concerns to social capital theory and predict that managers can use individual social capital to reduce personal effort costs, which is not in the best interest of the firm. To test this prediction, we collect data on all 8,019 hiring decisions from general managers in the...