Ever since the pioneering work of Rottenberg (1956) and Neale (1964), the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis (UOH) has played a major role in the economic analysis of professional sport leagues. However, decades of empirical research have not been successful in establishing clear evidence for the...

We show that professional soccer players exhibit reference-dependent behavior during matches. Controlling for the state of the match and for unobserved heterogeneity, we show on a minute-by-minute basis that a player breaches the rules of the game, measured by the referee's assignment of cards,...

We empirically study the impact of interim rank on risk taking and performance using data on professionals competing in tournaments for large rewards. As we observe both the intended action and the performance of each participant, we can measure risk taking and performance separately. We present...

An important issue in many antitrust lawsuits involving professional sports leagues and their member teams is the extent to which franchises within the same, and across different, professional sports leagues compete with one another for fans and advertisers. Complicating the issue is the fact...

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...

We study strategic investment decisions in multi-stage contests with heterogeneous players. Our theoretical model of a round-robin rank-order tournament predicts that players conserve resources in a current contest to spend more in the subsequent contest if the degree of heterogeneity in the...

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...