FAVORITISM AND REFEREE BIAS IN EUROPEAN SOCCER: EVIDENCE FROM THE SPANISH LEAGUE AND THE UEFA CHAMPIONS LEAGUE

In this paper, we test for, and find evidence of, referee bias in favor of home teams in European football using minute‐by‐minute analysis to control for within‐game events. The context for the analysis is Spain's Primera Liga and the Union of European Football Association (UEFA) Champions League. We find that the award of sanctions by Spanish referees in the Champions League are not significantly different to those of the referees from other countries and as such are subject to the same sources of bias. In Primera Liga matches where the crowd is separated from the pitch by running tracks, we find that the probability of the award of a yellow card to the home team is higher and that of the away team is lower compared to matches played at stadia without running tracks. Similar results are found in the Champions League, where efforts are made to hire “neutral” referees. Referee behavior is also influenced by the size of the crowd in attendance. (JEL D8, J2)     

Are there too few trades during the NFL draft?

College football players are initially assigned to teams in the National Football League (NFL) through the league’s draft selection process. At each team’s turn to pick, the team has the option of exercising the pick itself or trading it to another team. If gains from trade are exhausted, draft picks should be exercised by the team with the highest expected value. That is, the expected player contribution garnered from a given pick should not be dependent on whether the pick was traded or retained. Regression results, however, indicate that controlling for a player’s draft position, when a team trades up to acquire a player, that player is more likely to have greater on-field success. This suggests that there are too few draft day trades. Plausible reasons are high transaction costs or the fear of media scrutiny that draft trades can engender.     

The trickle-down effect: how elite sporting success affects amateur participation in German football

The trickle-down effect assumes that sporting success at the elite sport level descends down to the amateur sport level in the sense that people are inspired by sporting success to participate themselves. Previous research failed to find convincing evidence for this relationship, mostly because the data used and the methods applied (e.g. cross-sectional data, primary data, correlations) were not adequate. This study addresses these shortcomings and examines the effect of national sporting success on amateur sport participation in German football using longitudinal data from 1950 to 2014. Since an individual’s decision to participate in sport also depends on other factors, the regression models also control for working hours, real wages etc. The results show that only World Cup title wins of the men’s national team have a positive and statistically significant impact on the number of and percentage changes in individual club memberships, clubs and teams. The coefficients of European Championship titles and title wins of the women’s national team turn out to be mostly insignificant. Future research should examine the reasons as to why only title wins by the men’s team have a measurable inspirational effect on amateur sport participation in football.     

CIVIL WAR EXPOSURE AND VIOLENCE

In recent years scholars have begun to focus on the consequences of individuals' exposure to civil war, including its severe health and psychological consequences. Our innovation is to move beyond the survey methodology that is widespread in this literature to analyze the actual behavior of individuals with varying degrees of exposure to civil war in a common institutional setting. We exploit the presence of thousands of international soccer (football) players with different exposures to civil conflict in the European professional leagues, and find a strong relationship between the extent of civil conflict in a player's home country and his propensity to behave violently on the soccer field, as measured by yellow and red cards. This link is robust to region fixed effects, country characteristics (e.g. rule of law, per capita income), player characteristics (e.g. age, field position, quality), outliers, and team fixed effects. Reinforcing our claim that we isolate the effect of civil war exposure rather than simple rule breaking or something else entirely, there is no meaningful correlation between our measure of exposure to civil war and soccer performance measures not closely related to violent conduct. The result is also robust to controlling for civil wars before a player's birth, suggesting that it is not driven by factors from the distant historical past.     

Estimating Coaching Efficiency in Professional Team Sports: Evidence from English Association Football

This study provides a review of the literature on sporting production functions with an emphasis on different input‐output specifications and alternative estimation procedures. Empirical evidence is reported for English association football on the robustness of estimates of coaching efficiency to changes in estimation methods and the definition of team performance and playing talent inputs. A measure of player quality based on predicted start‐of‐season transfer values is developed. It is found that the estimation of coaching efficiency is sensitive to the choice of time‐invariant efficiency models versus time‐varying and inefficiency effects models. It is also found that the results are little affected by different measures of team performance but are highly sensitive to the use of an ex post financial expenditure input measure. Ex ante input measures based on start‐of‐season player characteristics or predicted transfer values are recommended as more appropriate on both theoretical and empirical grounds.     

Repeated price competition between individuals and between teams

We conducted an experimental study of price competition in a duopolistic market. The market was operationalized as a repeated game between two “teams” with one, two, or three players in each team. We found that asking (and winning) prices were significantly higher in competition between individuals than in competition between two- or three-person teams. There were no general effects of team size, but prices increased with time when each team member was paid his or her own asking price and decreased when the team's profits were divided equally. This result is consistent with a simple model of individual learning.     

Changing of the guards: New coaches in Austria’s premier football league

Professional team sports provide an ideal real world experiment to explore the effect of top executive replacement due to the availability of excellent performance data. This paper investigates how replacing the coach affects the performance of football teams. Analyzing almost 2,000 matches of the Austrian premier football league by ordinal (probit) regression techniques we find that a new coach tends to enhance team performance in home matches but to weaken it in away matches. However, neither of these effects turns out to be statistically significant. Nevertheless, the much discussed coach effect—ousting an underperforming coach in order to improve team performance at least temporarily—may make sense despite the costs involved by providing stronger ex-ante incentives for effort.

视角系数能否预测景观认知——以东京 文化遗产庭园为例

文化遗产景观正在面临城市化的挑战。为了解游客对城市背景下文化遗产庭园的认知,探索景观形态和游客认知之间的关系,对东京都内6个文化遗产庭园进行了游客认知的调查,并利用球面相机拍摄的全景图计算观测点各景观要素的视角系数。结果发现,天空、庭园、背景建筑的视角系数均与文化遗产庭园的安静感、尺度感、质感、构成感及开阔感显著相关,其中庭园的视角系数是对认知项目最有效的预测因子,并且其预测性不会因为游客国籍或性别的改变而有很大的变化。此外,园外现代建筑的视角系数与庭园的自然感、人工感及历史感均无明显关系。发现将景观认知研究拓展到文化遗产景观的空间形态领域,为文化遗产景观的评价提供了潜在的环境指标,亦是景观评价公众参与的一次实践经验。     

The Impact of Transfer Fees on Professional Sports: An Analysis of the New Transfer System for European Football*

We evaluate the effect of the recently approved transfer system for European professional football which will replace the current system (implemented by the Bosman judgment in 1995). The focus is on the comparison of wages, profits, the length of contracts and investment incentives. Our main findings are that (i) the new regime reduces a player's overall payoff because it increases the new club's renegotiation payoff, and (ii) since training generates a general skill, the new regime will also diminish incentives to invest in the education of young talents, because a new club benefits more from the initial club's investment.     

A college athletics recruiting game to teach the economics of rent-seeking

The authors of this article describe an adaptation of the rent-seeking game by Goeree and Holt (1999) to the recruiting of athletes by NCAA Division I football and basketball teams. Students engage in an effort-based lottery, i.e., recruiting to sign a blue-chip prospect. The winner gets the prize—the player's marginal revenue product in excess of his grant in aid. Students recruit in three scenarios: by recruiting legally, by recruiting legally or with illegal bribes, and by offering wages to athletes in an auction. The authors demonstrate the game's use in a principles course, but it is easily adaptable to other courses. To aid instructors unfamiliar with sports and NCAA recruiting, they include a comprehensive lesson plan with suggested readings and multimedia.     

The role of conference externalities and other factors in determining the annual recruiting rankings of football bowl subdivision (FBS) teams

In this article, we analyse the impact of school, head coach and conference characteristics on a college football team’s annual recruiting ranking. Utilizing panel data collected from various sources covering 2002–2014, we find that measures of recent school success such as having winning seasons and finishing seasons ranked in the Associated Press (AP) top 25 poll have a positive impact on a team’s recruiting ranking. Similarly, schools with more successful head coaches tend to earn better recruiting classes, while schools facing bowl bans, scholarship restrictions and probation tend to earn worse recruiting classes. Various measures of conference achievement indicate that conference externalities in recruiting may indeed be positive as is often suggested; however, there is much potential for a negative externality as well.     

The Favourite-Longshot Bias and Market Efficiency in UK Football betting

It is shown that the individual fixed-odds betting market on UK football exhibits the same favourite-longshot bias as that found in horse-racing. The bias appears both in betting on results (home win, away win or draw) and in betting on specific scores, and there are certain trading rules which appear to be profitable. Poisson and Negative Binomial regressions are carried out to estimate the mean number of goals scored by a team in a match with given market odds for the various outcomes. Tables of odds for individual scores are derived and these appear to fit the actual outcomes far better than those of the bookmaker.     

R&D团队中领导行为、创新氛围与知识创新的关系:案例研究

采用案例研究方法,以全球最著名的研发机构——美国国家航空航天局(NASA)为例,分析了R&D团队中的领导行为与知识创新的关系以及团队创新氛围在其中的中介作用。根据SECI模型,探索了团队层面的R&D团队知识创新的结构维度,得到R&D团队领导行为、团队创新氛围与知识创新间关系的修正模型。案例研究结果表明:R&D团队中的领导行为对团队知识创新的影响部分是通过创新氛围实现的;社会情境在团队创新氛围与知识创新之间起调节作用。     

Film Geopolitics in Practice: Marketing The Miracle of Bern

This essay demonstrates how critical geopolitics of film can benefit from attention to behind-the-scenes practices in films' lives by examining “territorial appeals”: invocations of territorial interest or identity to justify a project or win support for a position. By tracing marketing strategies in the emergence of The Miracle of Bern, a 2003 film that celebrates West Germany's World Cup football victory over Hungary in 1954, the essay shows opportunities and limitations of territorial appeals to win production funds, find distributors, and shape discourse at home and abroad. This study of negotiations among a variety of actors and institutions reveals how marketing – in all its forms – is on the “front lines” of national identity construction and perception.     

Family violence and football: the effect of unexpected emotional cues on violent behavior

We study the link between family violence and the emotional cues associated with wins and losses by professional football teams. We hypothesize that the risk of violence is affected by the “gain-loss” utility of game outcomes around a rationally expected reference point. Our empirical analysis uses police reports of violent incidents on Sundays during the professional football season. Controlling for the pregame point spread and the size of the local viewing audience, we find that upset losses (defeats when the home team was predicted to win by four or more points) lead to a 10% increase in the rate of at-home violence by men against their wives and girlfriends. In contrast, losses when the game was expected to be close have small and insignificant effects. Upset wins (victories when the home team was predicted to lose) also have little impact on violence, consistent with asymmetry in the gain-loss utility function. The rise in violence after an upset loss is concentrated in a narrow time window near the end of the game and is larger for more important games. We find no evidence for reference point updating based on the halftime score.     

Competition Among National Football Leagues. Does It Exist? Should We Regulate?

It is often supposed that the stakeholders of a national football league draw more satisfaction from their sport if the league is balanced, that is, if a large number of clubs have a reasonable chance of winning. This is the so‐called Competitive balance hypothesis. This hypothesis can be challenged, however, in the context of international competition like the European champions league. It could be that the utility of national leagues' stakeholders would be higher if the probability of victory for their nation's club at the international level were higher. If this were the case, a league's governing body intending to maximize the quality of the national league by making use of redistributive schemes would face a trade‐off between national competitive balance and international performance of the national representative club. We propose a simple microeconomic framework to model this trade‐off. If a non‐cooperative game exists among the national league governing bodies, whether it is a Nash or a Stackelberg one, this game would result in inefficient redistributive policies. We find ‘soft’ empirical evidence of such a competition among the big 5 football leagues in Europe. This result supports the idea of the creation of an international regulatory body. We derive the conditions under which the international regulatory body should ensure that the leagues' governing bodies implement redistributive schemes guaranteeing the respect of the national competitive balance. We also emphasize the risk of experiencing a drop in the quality of leagues if one of them becomes too big relatively to the others, what we call the tragedy of the wealthy.     

Interactive team reasoning: A contribution to the theory of co-operation

This paper describes interactions between agents who sometimes choose as individuals and sometimes as members of teams. Choosing as a member of a team entails not only being motivated by the team's objective, but also a distinctive pattern of reasoning: an agent who “team reasons” computes, and chooses her component in, aprofile evaluated using the team's objective function. It is not assumed that a given agent team reasons for a particular team; there may be more than one team, and which she reasons for is here treated probabilistically. Ordinary reasoning is a special case in which the team is a singleton. The framework therefore encompasses interactions paradigmatic in the theory of co-operative behaviour in which agents may choose either for the group of for themselves. The hypothesis that people may team reason if and when they are group motivated can, it is shown, explain some puzzling aspects of co-operative behaviour in a new way.     

Productive Efficiency and Salary Distribution: The Case of US Major League Baseball

Recent theoretical research suggests that a firm's salary structure can affect the firm's productivity. We investigate the relationship between payroll inequality and production using US Major League Baseball data. Employing panel data methods, this study finds that salary inequality has a significantly negative effect on team success. A general result is that team success in term of wins does not seem to be correlated with efficiency; specifically, some of the least successful teams are also some of the most efficient. In addition, salary inequality does not appear to be correlated with efficiency. Furthermore, revenues generated by teams are not necessarily correlated with team efficiency.     

用户投诉对企业绩效的影响研究——基于注意力基础观的视角

用户投诉是反映用户对企业产品或服务质量满意度的重要指标,对企业获取竞争优势与长久发展具有重要影响。为探讨用户投诉对企业绩效之间的影响机制,本文基于注意力基础观视角,运用2016—2021年223家中国上市企业投诉数据,实证分析用户投诉与企业绩效之间的关系及高管团队特征和政务环境的调节作用。研究结果表明,用户投诉与企业绩效显著负相关;女性高管比例会削弱用户投诉与企业绩效之间的负向关系;高管持股比例增强用户投诉与企业绩效之间的负向关系;高管受教育水平削弱用户投诉与企业绩效之间的负向关系;政务环境削弱用户投诉与企业绩效之间的负向关系。本文研究结果拓展了注意力基础观的实证检验,分析了企业注意力分配的前因,并定量分析了用户投诉对企业绩效的影响程度,同时讨论了用户投诉、高管团队、政务环境与企业绩效间的作用机制。为此,企业高管团队必须重视投诉管理和风险管理,优化注意力配置以提高用户满意度,进而创造更大的竞争优势并提高企业绩效。     

LOCATION OF PUBLIC FIRM IN THE PRESENCE OF MULTINATIONAL FIRM: A MIXED DUOPOLY APPROACH*

By incorporating a multinational private firm into the mixed duopoly model with Hotelling‐type spatial competition, we show that the private firm's nationality is a matter of the public firm's location. As the share of foreign capital increases in the private (multinational) firm, the public firm moves to a central place. The effects of price regulation and sequential location choice are also discussed.