Total effort, competitive balance and the optimal contest success function

This paper shows that, in the constrained case, the value weighted contest success function (CSF) maximizes not only total effort, but every objective function which is increasing in total effort and competitive balance. In the unconstrained case, a first price all-pay auction with a reserve price is optimal only if the impact of competitive balance on the objective is small. Otherwise, a modified value weighted CSF is optimal.     

On competitive balance in the group stage of the UEFA Champions League*

This article examines competitive balance in the group stage of the UEFA Champions League over the last two decades (1999/2000–2017/2018). Competitive balance is considered both before and after a competition. Have the groups been designed in such a way as to ensure similar levels of competitive balance ex ante? Have the demonstrated strengths (ex post competitive balance) of the different groups been similar over each season? What is the relationship between the competitive balance in the designed groups and that achieved in the same groups after the competition? Are the performance achieved in terms of ex post competitive balance similar to ex ante competitive balance levels? We found that, despite expectations, the groups' ex ante competitive balance was not homogeneous. Although ex ante competitive balance serves as a good predictor, on average, of ex post competitive balance, we observed significant differences at the levels of group and seasons. Therefore, it is possible to improve the design mechanism of the groups that make up the group stage of the champions so that they are composed homogeneously in terms of ex ante competitive balance.     

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.     

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.     

一级方程式(F1)赛车产业创新及其动力机制研究

以熊彼特的创新理论为分析框架,全面地解构了F1赛车产业领域内的创新。F1赛车产业创新涉及产品创新、技术创新、市场创新、材料创新和制度创新5个方面,创新动因主要有竞争压力、重要知识激发、预期利润压力、赛车产业集群和规则的变动等。     

The flow through of cost changes in competitive telecommunications: Theory and evidence

Flow through refers to the effect of a change in incremental production costs on the prices of goods or services, and is a topic of great interest to regulators and others. This article provides a framework for both analyzing flow through, and for evaluating whether or not flow through, properly defined, occurs in the long distance telecommunications industry. We focus on the effects of changes in switched access charges on domestic long distance prices for the largest U.S. long distance carriers in the late 1990s. Utilizing a double bootstrap technique uniquely suited to this problem, we find flow through occurred over the sample period. The technique illustrated here may find useful applications in other regulated sectors.First version received: March 2003 / Final version received: January 2004The authors are grateful to the editor and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are the responsibility of the authors.     

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.     

Selection and incentives in contests: evidence from horse racing

The designer of internal labour market promotion contests must balance the need to select the best candidate with the need to provide incentives for all candidates. We use an extensive data set from horse racing – where there is abundant variation in contest design features – to analyse if there are particular features that help to achieve these two objectives. We find that contests with higher prize money and fewer participants are the most successful at achieving the dual remit of selection and incentives.     

Analysis of changes in Dutch emission trade balance(s) between 1996 and 2007

In this paper we construct bilateral emission trade balances (ETB) for The Netherlands with 17 regions and compare results for 1996 and 2007 for three different greenhouse gasses. We establish a cross-sectional analysis of bilateral ETBs into a volume of trade, composition and technology effect. In order to analyze the driving forces of changes over time we perform a structural decomposition analysis of embodied import and export emissions. The main findings are that the embodied import emissions have increased by 37% whereas export emissions increased by only 3%, which is primarily driven by CO₂. The 2007 bilateral balances are positive with OECD countries but negative with economies such as Russia, Africa and China. The analyses demonstrate that the worsening of the ETB is to a large extent caused by the changing composition of trade: the Dutch economy increasingly exports clean products and imports dirty products.     

The effects of broadcast on a team's market and on competitive balance from the perspective of fans maximizing utility

We examine the decision of fans to attend the game or watch the exact televised match to address whether broadcast lowers revenue collected at the gate and worsens competitive balance. In most cases, broadcasts lower attendance and collection at the gate but do not necessarily worsen competitive balance. Weaker teams can benefit from broadcast revenue and catch up with their stronger counterpart. However, teams that make more money from broadcasts and a broad fan base can gain more advantages from broadcasts and worsen competitive balance.     

企业社会责任与企业价值——组织惰性与行业敏感度的调节作用

以2012—2016年沪深两市A股上市公司的数据为依据,通过实证分析研究了企业社会责任对企业价值的影响,并从组织层面和行业层面的视角探讨了组织惰性和行业敏感度对该影响的调节作用。研究结果表明,企业社会责任对企业价值具有显著的促进作用;组织惰性减弱了企业社会责任对企业价值的促进作用;行业敏感度阻碍了企业通过履行社会责任进而提升企业价值的过程。     

Asset illiquidity and market shutdowns in competitive equilibrium

This paper introduces asymmetric information in a competitive asset market into a dynamic general-equilibrium model with borrowing constraints. In the presence of borrowing constraints, asset sales become a crucial means for agents to finance opportunities to invest in new assets. In this environment, reduced asset sales due to asymmetric information lower the economic growth rate if agents invest in new assets. The volume of asset trade, however, becomes zero if and only if agents stop investing in new assets because of sufficiently low aggregate productivity. A low economic growth rate with a market shutdown is solely due to low aggregate productivity without any role of the market shutdown.     

Auditing and competitive bidding in the public sector

This paper investigates the impact of a ministry's budget size on the choice between auditing a (Niskanen)bureau and employing competitive bidding in the provision of a publicly funded good. The ministry's marginal expected payoff increases fastest with budget size for auctioning as opposed to auditing. However, the ministry is shown to switch from a purely public provision to a competitive provision as the budget size increases even if expected fixed costs favor the audit. The study contributes to the literature by extending the Niskanen framework and by endogenizing the institutional arrangements for the provision of public sector goods.     

Wages and productivity growth in a competitive industry

We describe the evolution of productivity growth in a competitive industry with free entry and exit. The exogenous wage rate determines the firms’ engagement in labor productivity enhancing process innovation. There is a unique steady state of the industry dynamics, which is globally asymptotically stable. In the steady state, the number of active firms, their unit labor cost and supply depend on the growth rate but not on the level of the wage rate. In addition to providing comparative statics of the steady state, the paper characterizes the industry's adjustment path.     

Asymmetric and endogenous within-group communication in competitive coordination games

Within-group communication in competitive coordination games has been shown to increase competition between groups and lower efficiency. This study further explores potentially harmful effects of communication, by addressing the questions of (1) asymmetric communication and (2) the endogenous emergence of communication. Our theoretical analysis provides testable hypotheses regarding the effect of communication on competitive behavior and efficiency. We test these predictions using a laboratory experiment. The experiment shows that although asymmetric communication is not as harmful as symmetric communication, it leads to more aggressive competition and lower efficiency relative to the case when neither group can communicate. Moreover, groups vote to endogenously establish communication channels even though they would earn higher payoffs if jointly they chose to restrict within-group communication.     

Entry and growth in a perfectly competitive vintage model

A perfectly competitive vintage-knowledge model of Schumpeterian growth is introduced to study the relation between growth, technology-lifetime, entry, and productivity-dispersion. The incentive to innovate is generated by the productivity-dispersion (latent in traditional vintage models) between new and old plants, rather than by monopoly rents. The model has a unique steady-state REE with endogenous growth. The endogenous extent of entry constitutes a buffer, dampening the effect of research-efficiency and completely neutralizing the effect of population size or population growth rates on per-capita income levels and growth rates. Variations of research-efficiency lead to a negative relation between growth and vintage-lifetime and a non-monotonic relation between growth and productivity-dispersion.     

Market structure and competitive equilibrium in dynamic economic models

Recently theorists have analyzed economies which potentially contain both finite and infinite horizon overlapping generations, using “Arrow-Debreu” (complete) markets. Typically, applied models assume recursive spot and contingent securities markets, implying a different equilibrium concept. Indeed, if infinite horizon agents are present recursive equilibria cannot exist without some side conditions on debt. With the right side conditions, we show that every recursive market equilibrium allocation is a complete market equilibrium allocation and vice versa. This bridges a gap between theory and applications, and extends existing equivalence results on market structure.     

Optimal and competitive programs in reachable multi sector models

Summary. We show that in multi-sector optimal growth models, where the technology satisfies a simple reachability condition, infinite horizon programs which satisfy the competitive conditions are optimal. We provide examples of a variety of production models where the reachability condition is satisfied. An example is also provided where the reachability condition is not satisfied and there are competitive programs which are not optimal. The results of the paper are of interest from the standpoint of decentralization in intertemporal economies. Received: March 24, 1994; revised version: October 10, 1998     

中国工业的环境效率与规制研究

近年来,环境污染问题已经日益突出,文章通过引入方向性环境距离函数模型来分析非期望产出问题,选取相应指标对我国各省份在四种环境管制政策,即弱可处置性下(环境管制弱)、强可处置性下(环境管制强)、GDP:污染=3:1以及GDP:污染=1:3时的环境效率状况进行了测算并解释说明,运用Tobit模型分析了各种环境影响因素对效率值的作用机理,最后得出了相应的结论。     

Trade balance and income in historical perspective

This paper develops a dynamic analysis of the trade balance to investigate the roles of supply and demand shocks. It also introduces global shocks in the analysis to take into account the comovement of income across countries. The results, based on the long-run historical data and a structural VAR analysis, show that, in the U.K., Australia, Canada, and Sweden, domestic and global supply shocks, while dominant causes in long-term and cyclical changes in output, are unimportant for the trade balance. The trade balance is explained mostly by shocks that cause transitory changes in income. Transitory income shocks cause income and the trade balance to move in opposite directions in all countries except Sweden. The countercyclical behavior of the trade balance seems to be a robust feature in the U.K. and Canada but not in the smaller economies of Australia and Sweden.This research was supported by a summer research grant from the Carol Martin Gatton College of Business and Economics at the University of Kentucky. The grant was made possible by a donation of funds to the College by Ashland Inc. I appreciate the Editor, two anonymous referees, Dick Gift and Mark Toma for their helpful suggestions. All remaining errors are mine.