Prospective measures of competitive balance: application to money lines in major league baseball

This study examines competitive balance in Major League Baseball (MLB) by looking at the money lines for the games during the regular season. The assertion is that the closer the money lines are to indicating that each team has an equal chance of winning each game, the more competitive balance there is in the league. This study extends the model developed by Bowman et al. (2012), which used point spreads to assess competitive balance in the National Football League (NFL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA). In this study, money lines for the 1999–2011 seasons were used to develop several measures of competitive balance. The results indicate that competitive balance increased rather substantially during this period. A by-product of this research is to identify the most highly rated team and pitcher. In 2002, New York Yankees were the highest rated team and from the year 2000 Pedro Martinez was the highest rated pitcher.     

Two universal,probabilistic measures of competitive imbalance

I propose two universal measures of competitive imbalance. The first is, like those in the existing literature, based on team season win–loss records. The second is based solely on the outcomes of the various series of individual matchups during a season. Both measures will on average equal (2p ? 1)², where p is the ‘typical’ probability that the stronger team will win any particular game. Both measures will average zero when a league is competitively balanced and will converge to 1 as the league approaches perfect imbalance. In addition, both measures are universal, in that they are on average independent of the number of teams in the league and the number of games played during the season.     

A performance assessment of the Angolan soccer league

This article analyses the technical efficiency of the Angolan soccer league from 2008 to 2014, using a translog distance stochastic frontier model. The Greene stochastic frontier model, presented in 2005, and Kumbhakar stochastic frontier model, presented in 1990, are adopted, and the covariates used include Luanda location, funding by the oil company Sonangol, club supported by rich fans and club relegated during the period. Policy implications are then derived.     

新形势下企业共青团工作存在的问题及对策

基层团组织是共青团各项工作的落脚点,也是团员青年积累经验、锻炼能力、展示才华的大舞台。近年来,川庆油建公司经历了两次专业化重组,已经成为集设计与施工为一体的地面建设专业化公司。公司当前正处在一个极其重要的战略转型期,面临着前所未有的发展机遇和挑战,只有全体青年员工认清形势,明确任务,才能为公司又好又快发展做出更大的贡献。如何在企业改革重组的历史条件下,探索新走向,构筑新格局,保持企业基层团建工作的发展势头,保持团的工作的连续性和有效性,是一个值得在实践中加以探讨和思考的课题。针对基层团组织建设存在的以上问题,油建公司团委结合公司实际状况,在基层团组织建设方面做了一些工作,使公司团青组织体系日趋完善合理,团干队伍素质有了明显提高,但还存在很多不足,需要我们进一步去完善,去改进。     

Fan welfare maximization as a club objective in a professional sports league

Motivated by aspects of European soccer club governance (members' clubs supporters' trusts), a first formal analysis of fan welfare maximization as a club objective in a sports league is provided, with comparisons to objectives studied previously (profit and win maximization). Positive comparisons focus on team qualities, ticket prices, attendances and the impact of capacity crowds; empirically observed ticket black markets and inelastic pricing are consistent only with fan welfare maximization. Normatively, social welfare (aggregate league surplus) is well-served by a league of fan welfare maximizers, or sometimes win maximizers, but not profit maximizers; leagues should not normally make profits.     

东北农业大学“网上团支部”探索网络思想政治教育生活化模式

面对当前网络思想政治教育中存在的种种冲突和矛盾,东北农业大学提出并建立了＂网上团支部＂。通过对网上团支部的功能介绍,具体阐述了网上团支部生活化模式的构建,探索生活化的网络思想政治教育之路。     

Prospective measures of competitive balance application to money lines in the national hockey league

The authors have previously introduced the concept of utilizing point spreads to measure competitive balance in professional sports and a methodology for doing so. They assessed competitive balance in the National Football League and the National Basketball Association. This methodology was extended to measuring competitive balance utilizing money lines in major league baseball. This study starts by applying the same model to the money lines for the 2005–2015 seasons to measure competitive balance in the National Hockey League. It then statistically adjusts the money lines under various scenarios to estimate the effects of overtime rules and shootouts on competitive balance. Similar analyses of overtime effects on competitive balance of other sports are also completed for comparison purposes. The results indicate that competitive balance in the National Hockey League increased rather substantially during this period and that overtime rules and shootouts have had a much larger positive impact on competitive balance in the NHL than overtime approaches have had on the competitive balance of any of the other sports examined.     

Evidence on the rationality of expectations in the British manufacturing sector

Empirical support is shown for the propositionthat sports fans prefer the composition of their home team to remain the same from season to season. Controlling for price, income, population, team quality, league, year, the stadium effects, the regression results indicate that for each percentage point increase in the turnover of the composition of the team, attendance will fall by about 0.7%. The implications of this heretofore ignored tendency are briefly discussed.     

Major League Baseball 2015, What a Difference a Year Makes

An econometric analysis of the 2015 Major League Baseball season is conducted with respect to regular season victories. Results obtained confirm some, but not all, results reported in prior research. The importance of solid team pitching and offense is underscored. Similar to 2014, team defence did not vary sufficiently to play a statistically significant role in team victory differences. Outcomes for total payrolls and salary disparities differ substantially from prior seasons. History may serve as a guide to what occurs on the field, but it does not always replicate the patterns of bygone years. Parameter heterogeneity is substantial and argues against pooling sample data from season to season. From a strict econometric perspective, the results obtained indicate that panel methods should not be utilized to analyse wins data for Major League Baseball. Ultimately, 2015 represents another departure from the standard baseball norm.     

An industry test for ethnic discrimination in major league soccer

This paper tests for salary discrimination based on player ethnicity in Major League Soccer (MLS) by making innovative use of player movements in a unique setting. The discriminating team investigated is Club Deportivo Chivas USA, which had a preference for employing Hispanic players. Evidence of discrimination is found by analyzing how other teams valued the former players of Chivas USA differently across ethnicity after the team was disbanded by the league. The nature of MLS player contracts and drafting rules allow for a simple and unique test for salary discrimination that has not previously been possible to implement.     

Impact of league restructuring on team sport attendances: the case of rugby league

An econometric analysis of attendances at Rugby Footbal League matches, in England, over the period 1966–1990 is presented. The major finding is that the move from one to two leagues, in 1973, had a substantial impact on attendances. Teams in the upper league experienced greater attendances ceteris paribuswhilst those in the lower league had reduced attendances.     

Just looking for a good game: competitive balance in the Korean Professional Baseball League

Rottenberg’s uncertainty of outcome hypothesis is about preferences that can vary across fans and sports. We provide the first evidence of the empirical power of the hypothesis in the Korean Professional Baseball League (KPBL). In a panel data set, team-level aggregation over years shows that fans of this league attend in ways consistent with the hypothesis at the level of game uncertainty and consecutive season uncertainty, but only the first is statistically significant. KPBL fans appear to just be looking for a good game. This is consistent with the nearly complete concentration of post-season participation among a very few teams outside of the major population centre in Seoul and a lack of local team identification among KPBL fans. Our work adds to the diversity of league structures in the competitive balance literature since talent levels in KPBL are the result of parent company advertising choices rather than geographic identification. There are research questions and a policy implication.     

The extent to which unbalanced schedules cause distortions in sports league tables

The Australian Football League (AFL) has operated its fixture on the basis of an unbalanced schedule since the league expanded from 12 to 14 teams in 1987. This system contains a number of factors (some random) determining the set of bilateral combinations of teams that play each other on an extra occasion during the course of the season, not least of all maximising attendances. While the status quo may be unavoidable to some extent (it is also a bone of contention to many fans), its implications for within-season measures of competitive balance are nonetheless obvious. This is because of the potential for biases being created in the end-of-season league table as a result of the unbalanced schedule. This paper uses a modified model to correct for this inherent bias over the seasons 1997–2008, and the results are discussed in detail. The model is also generalisable to many unbalanced schedule designs observed in professional sports leagues worldwide.     

The demand for rugby league: evidence from causality tests

During the last few years, there has been an upsurge of interest in the determinants of the demand for professional team sports. Typically, traditional demand estimation techniques are used to examine the determinants of attendance. This paper attempts to show that the use of these techniques may be misleading. Existing studies implicitly or explicitly assume a direction of causality. Econometric estimation techniques are then applied to examine this direction of causality. However, no account is taken of possible spurious regression and time series properties of the data are not fully explored. These omissions may have led to faulty policy recommendations. In attempting to rectify traditional approaches, this study will examine the time series properties of rugby league attendence and success prior to engaging in estimation.     

The efficiency of Mozambique soccer league: the Moçambola

This paper analyses the technical efficiency of the Mozambique football league from 2008 to 2014 using a Bayesian stochastic frontier model with exponential specification. Covariates include contextual characteristics such as location, identification as a Muslim club, and sporting performance. The results uncover that Mozambique sports clubs display varying efficiency, revealing distinct managerial incentives in the Mozambique football league. Policy implications are derived, including efficiency scores deemed to be acceptable to the league and reconsideration of the rationale for national investment in all league’s clubs.     

Our fans in the north: the demand for British Rugby League

This paper reports the results of estimating a single equation model of an attendance function for British Rugby League over the seasons 1982/83 to 1990/91. The data are panel data covering virtually every team which played in the two division league over the nine year time period. Diagnostic tests indicate that the appropriate model is a semilog random effects model, where the dependent variable is league attendance weighted by population. The major results are as follows: there are significant positive relationships between league attendance and various measures of team success (although the direction of causality is moot), team quality (as proxied by the two divisions) and the economic quality of team location (as proxied by the unemployment rate); but there is no discernible relationship between league attendance and either success in nonleague trophy competitions or measures of exceptional player quality.     

STADIUM CONSTRUCTION AND MINOR LEAGUE BASEBALL ATTENDANCE

The established literature shows that new stadium construction for major league baseball (MLB) teams can increase attendance, but there are limited studies at the minor league level. We use a data set encompassing all A, AA, and AAA minor league baseball teams from 1992 to 2006 to estimate the impact of stadium construction on minor league attendance. This data set includes almost 200 teams, over half of which constructed a new stadium during the 15‐year observation period. Over a 10‐year period our results show that new stadiums increase attendance by 1.2 million fans at the AAA level, 0.4 million at the AA and high A level, and 0.2 million at short season low A. A cost benefit analysis suggests that increased ticket sales do not offset the stadium costs, in line with previous works on MLB. (JEL H0, L83)     

THE EFFECT OF GATE REVENUE SHARING ON SOCIAL WELFARE

This paper provides a theoretical model of a team sports league based on contest theory and studies the welfare effect of gate revenue sharing. It derives two counterintuitive results. First, it challenges the "invariance proposition" by showing that revenue sharing reduces competitive balance and thus produces a more unbalanced league. Second, the paper concludes that a lower degree of competitive balance compared with the noncooperative league equilibrium yields a higher level of social welfare and club profits. Combining both results, it concludes that gate revenue sharing increases social welfare and club profits in our model. ( JEL L83)     

Performance and revenue in professional league football: evidence from Granger causality tests

Using a dataset comprising annual performance (measured by final league position) and gate revenue for 77 Football League clubs which maintained unbroken league membership between 1946 and 1994, the relationship between performance and revenue is investigated using cointegration and causality tests. A cointegrating relationship between performance and revenue is established in only 10 cases out of 77, although it is argued that some caution is required in interpreting these results, due to the low power of the relevant tests in relatively small samples. In Granger causality tests, more evidence is found of causality running from lagged revenue to current performance than of causality in the opposite direction, while the dependence of performance on revenue seems to be greater for the smaller clubs than for the larger. These results lend empirical support to the popular view that, unless checked by mechanisms for revenue redistribution within the league, the natural tendency is for success to become concentrated increasingly among a small group of elite, wealthy clubs.     

Betting market inefficiencies are short-lived in German professional football

In this article, we argue that potential inefficiencies on betting markets are more likely to exist at the very beginning of a season, when the available information on the teams’ playing strength is difficult to evaluate. This lack of reliable information should be particularly large in the case of recently promoted teams that have typically undergone major changes in the composition of their roster following their promotion. Without any information on the latter teams’ potential performance, they are particularly difficult to evaluate, which may eventually lead to inefficiencies and positive returns on investment in the betting market. We analyse odds from German first division Bundesliga soccer for the seasons from 2002/03 to 2015/16 to find betting market inefficiencies at the start of the season. As expected, betting on recently promoted team wins generates temporarily positive returns, especially for away games. These results suggest bookmakers to underestimate promoted teams’ ability to familiarize with the conditions in the new league, such as having to play in front of larger, often hostile crowds.