Sport as Business

There is both a popular and academic literature suggesting thatowners of sports teams do not profit maximize. The alternativeformulation entails either win or utility maximization, usuallysubject to a break-even constraint. Another line of economicanalysis holds that team owners do fundamentally profit maximizeor that profit maximization provides a useful benchmark againstwhich to assess actual performance. There has been some empiricalwork attempting to decipher the true objective function of teamowners. These results are inconclusive. Objective functions,however, remain important because they affect both owner behaviourand league performance. In practice, owners' objectives varyby team, league, and country and are strongly affected by howthe team relates to an owner's other assets. The next task formodelling the behaviour and performance of sports leagues isto take fuller account of the diversity of ownership objectiveswithin a given league.     

Evaluating Subsidies for Professional Sports in the United States and Europe: A Public-Sector Primer

The character of subsidies for the construction of professionalsports stadiums is changing in Europe and the United States.The incidence of these subsidies and the manner in which theyare changing offers insight into an evolving relationship betweenthe public and private sectors in building sports facilities.The changing financial imperatives this paper identifies andanalyses suggest that the myopic concerns of cities coupledwith powerful financial incentives for leagues and teams tobuild stadiums account for the spate of facilities constructedin the USA since Joe Robbie stadium in 1987. Growing publicscepticism and resistance to stadium construction has been responsiblefor the private sector bearing a larger portion of the stadiumconstruction costs, but teams have been more than compensatedwith increasingly generous leases. Cities have placated thepublic through the imposition of taxes that are either too smallper capita to justify strong resistance or through deflectingthe tax burden stadiums impose to non-residents. Since citiestaken together are adopting the same strategies, the realityis that stadiums collectively are being paid for by local taxpayers.The public will continue to pay for stadiums until cities recognizetheir shared interests and take a collective stand against theprofessional sports monopolies. As long as the leagues continueto maintain an excess team for franchises, cities will continueto comply with team and league financial demands while searchingfor ways to placate an increasingly sceptical taxpaying public.     

Team promotion in early major league baseball and the origin of the closed sports league

I argue that a quasi team-promotion system similar to European professional sports leagues once existed in the US, contrary to common perceptions. The first American pro team sport was baseball. From the creation of the first major league in 1876 to the early 1890s, entry was common, occurring primarily by the “promotion” of clubs in operation the previous season. The informal system ended abruptly after an 1892 merger that formed the prototype closed monopoly sports league. Empirical analysis indicates that the cessation of entry reduced competitive balance, and that in their initial year promoted teams outperformed new start-ups. While historians have recognized the elimination of between-league competition as an underlying motive for the monopoly merger, the simultaneous elimination of club entry and competition for league membership has gone virtually unnoticed.     

The Organization of Sports Leagues

Sports leagues have been organized in many different ways. Thisessay examines the incentive structure and efficiency of differentforms of league organization, including the methods for schedulinggames, admitting new members, and making operational decisions.The article also compares operations and outcomes in Europeand North America, and concludes that the European system ofpromotions and relegation is superior to the closed structureof American leagues, and that the American system of multipleparallel leagues to determine qualifications and seeding ina post-season tournament is efficiency enhancing. The articlealso discusses the optimal size and number of leagues, and concludesthat both the European and American systems produce too fewmajor-league teams, largely because they have permitted majorleagues to be monopolies.     

Promotion Mechanisms on the PGA TOUR

The dynamics of screening talent and promoting an athlete to a major team sports league is not entirely different from that of a major individual sports league. While talent is assessed through mechanisms offering more or less observations, coaching decisions and team quality that can affect performance in team sports are generally not present in individual sports. Avoiding the possible distortions that can come from assessing athletic talent in team sports, this article examines the ability of two PGA TOUR promotion mechanisms—the Nationwide Tour and Qualifying School (Q‐school)—to predict success. As expected, the results suggest that more observations from the Nationwide Tour assessment mechanism provide more information about talent that can be used to better predict success on the PGA TOUR. But place of finish also matters, so promotion through the Nationwide Tour alone is not sufficient for a player to have the greatest chance for success.     

Stee-rike four! What's wrong with the business of baseball? edited by Daniel R. Marburger praeger press, 1997, 218 pp.

This is a review of a 14-article volume edited by Daniel R. Marburger. These articles examine such topics as collective bargaining, player salaries, antitrust issues, and the problems of and future prospects for baseball. Major league baseball is an unregulated monopolist whose plant (stadium) is government-subsidized and whose unionized workers (players) share the monopoly profit with management. This sharing has led to considerable labor strife including strikes and lockouts. The major issues discussed in the book include the competitive imbalance as a result of large differences in team revenues, the player salary cap, and revenue sharing. The principal conclusions of the book include the marginal economic impact and benefits of a team on a city and the need to permit low-revenue teams to migrate.     

我国新能源企业高管团队组成特征与企业绩效的关系:董事会与股权结构的调节作用

新能源产业是"十二五"能源规划的重中之重,将面临巨大的机遇和挑战。我国新能源产业起步较晚,产业内政策体系不完善,具有资本密集性和技术密集性的特点,并且竞争非常激烈。在这样一个快速变动的环境中,董事会、股权结构对高管团队及企业绩效的影响关系到企业长期稳定发展。本文以在我国沪深两市上市的新能源企业为研究对象,探讨高管团队组成特征(包括规模、年龄及教育程度)与企业绩效(包括财务绩效与市场绩效)的关系,并以董事会权力、股权结构为调节变量进行实证分析。研究结果表明,随着市场竞争度的不断增强,规模较大的高管团队的优势凸显,同时,平均年龄较小的高管团队对企业绩效有明显的促进作用,此外,代表董事会权力的董事会持股比例较高可以强化高管团队组成特征与企业绩效的关系。     

Stadiums and Scheduling: Measuring Deadweight Losses in the Victorian Football League, 1920–70

Over a 50 year period, Australian Rules football's major league, the Victorian Football League, did not always use its largest and best-equipped stadium for regular season games between its most popular teams or schedule those teams to play twice in a regular season. We calculate deadweight losses from the use of capital goods (stadiums) and effects of match scheduling in this professional sports league. Such analysis has not been attempted previously because of the absence of a counterfactual. The welfare losses were significant but not sufficient to threaten the survival of a distance-protected cartel.     

Monopsony and competition: The impact of rival leagues on player salaries during the early days of baseball

During the early days of professional baseball, the dominant major leagues imposed a “reserve clause” designed to limit player wages by restricting competition for labor. Entry into the market by rival leagues challenged the incumbent monopsony cartel's ability to restrict compensation. Using a sample of player salaries from the first 40 years of the reserve clause (1880–1919), this study examines the impact of inter-league competition on player wages. This study finds a positive salary effect associated with rival league entry that is consistent with monopsony wage suppression, but the effect is stronger during the 20th century than the 19th century. Changes in levels of market saturation and minor-league competition may explain differences in the effects between the two eras.     

Leveling the Playing Field or Just Lowering Salaries? The Effects of Redistribution in Baseball

In an attempt to even the playing field, Major League Baseball has considered a number of different redistribution programs. To successfully address the problem of imbalance in the league, redistribution must affect teams' marginal revenue functions. Previous theoretical work has shown that efforts to redistribute revenues from rich to poor teams will lower the marginal value of winning of all teams, thus reducing the payments to labor. But it remains an empirical question as to whether the net effects of such programs have improved balance. In this paper we provide an empirical assessment of whether redistributive efforts between 1996 and 2001 succeeded in reallocating talent to less advantaged teams by estimating the effect of redistribution on the marginal revenue functions of small- and large-market teams. Our results indicate that redistribution lowered salaries by approximately 22% without affecting league balance.     

A Tale of Two Gate-Sharing Plans: The National Football League and the National League, 1952-1956

Do professional sports leagues design revenue-sharing rules primarily to help financially weaker teams, or do such organizations view revenue-sharing rules as ways to reward teams for being competitive? Baseball's National League and the National Football League provide evidence from the 1950s that revenue-sharing plans may have surprising effects. If strong teams draw well on the road, revenue-sharing plans may provide modest succor to teams in smaller cities and may benefit teams in larger cities. The two leagues' experiences also suggest that owners are willing to enact regressive aspects in their revenue-sharing plans, possibly to forestall moral hazard possibilities arising from automatically helping teams that remain poor draws or that fail to improve.     

Risk Aversion and Wages: Evidence from the Baseball Labor Market

We develop a bargaining model to assess how workers and employers might allocate wages inter-temporally in order to cope with risk. We then apply this model to 106 long-term contracts for major league baseball players’ services. Most of these agreements not only smooth employee compensation over time but suggest greater relative risk aversion for teams than players. Compared to the wages they might pay to retain these players on a succession of one-year contracts, teams often pay a premium on longer-term agreements to protect against market volatility and potential inability to replace a key player on the open market.     

The Implicit Incentive Effects of Horizontal Monitoring and Team Member Dependence on Individual Performance

This study examines the implicit incentive effects of horizontal monitoring and team member dependence for individuals working in teams but facing explicit incentives based solely on measures of individual performance. We combine proprietary performance data with survey data for 133 internal auditors. We show that the social influences of relatively high levels of both horizontal monitoring and team member dependence provide implicit incentives that motivate individual performance, making the provision of team rewards unnecessary to ensure individual and team productivity. We conclude that horizontal monitoring and team member dependence are complementary control mechanisms whose effectiveness helps explain the observed practice of organizing work into teams without explicit team‐based rewards.     

Competition Law as a Constraint on Monopolistic Exploitation by Sports Leagues and Clubs

The sports industry is characterized by dominant leagues andclubs exercising economic power unconstrained by rivals or thethreat of entry, often featuring market-division schemes. Leaguesand clubs can raise price, lower output, and lower quality tofans, create an artificial scarcity of top-tier teams resultingin publicly subsidized stadiums, and impose labour-market restraintsthat significantly harm consumers by misallocating players,most obviously by inhibiting low-quality teams' quick improvement.Business decisions made by club-run leagues feature significanttransaction costs, resulting in even greater inefficiency thanwould occur if leagues were controlled by a single entity. Manycountries have employed settled principles of competition law,originating in the common law of restraint of trade, as a usefuland meaningful constraint on the abuses of economic power insports. Courts have prohibited agreements between clubs or leaguesthat distort prices or output, or render output unresponsiveto consumer demand, unless the agreement is shown to be demonstrablynecessary to achieve a pro-competitive goal. In this paper,I argue that consumers and sports fans will benefit from a moreambitious enforcement of these established principles of competitionlaw.     

Firm-specific human capital in different market conditions: Evidence from the Japanese football league

This paper examined how and the extent to which obtaining skills to meet team specific human capital is important to improve football player’s performance by comparing the top league and the second league. Based on panel data of individual players during the 2012–2016 seasons of the Japan Professional Football League (J League), we found; (1) In the top-league, changing team reduced player’s performance and their performance improved as player’s tenure of the team and also tenure of J League increased. (2) returns from acquiring team specific skills on time of play in the game increase and then decrease as years have passed. (3) benefit from moving team depends on the timing of moving, and so rookie players can benefit from moving when team tenure reach 4 years or more. (4) In the second league, neither team tenure nor experience of the professional football player does not influence player’s performance.     

Public Subsidies and the Location and Pricing of Sports

Using public choice analysis, we determine how government subsidies affect location and pricing decisions of sports teams. We explain how voter referendums can create suboptimal outcomes for local communities and identify winners and losers in sport team subsidies. Subsidy bidding leads to higher subsidies and fewer sport franchises but does not alter team location. Sport subsidies generate additional revenue for owners and players at taxpayer expense, and non‐fan taxpayers subsidize both the team and fans. To increase political support for subsidies, teams lower ticket prices below the apparent profit‐maximizing level, which may cause inelastic ticket prices and ticket shortages.     

Increasing Downside or Outer Risk? The Challenge of Measuring Competitive Imbalance in Closed and Open Leagues

In two seminal articles, Menezes, Geiss, and Tressler (1980) and Menezes and Wang (2005) have defined the concepts of increases in downside and in outer risk. Such notions are useful to give intrinsic characterizations of the notions of prudence and temperance. In this article, we explore a new application about higher‐order risk preferences: the measurement of competitive imbalance in sports leagues. We show that desirable properties for the measurement of imbalance are the inclination to any increase in downside risk in the context of closed leagues, and the aversion to any increase in outer risk in the context of open leagues.     

Managers,specific human capital,and firm productivity in major league baseball

Recent research on the role of managers in firms concentrates on the relationship between compensation and individual performance, which links managerial skills and firm production only indirectly. In this paper, two related analyses test this link directly by examining how the experience of major league baseball managers affects both team and individual player performance. Grouped-data probit estimates indicate that, with team skills held constant, the probability of winning depends on the baseball-specific human capital of the manager. Further estimates, using the first-stage managerial attributes, also indicate that individual player performance improves when traded to "better-trained" managers.     

团队沟通、信任与冲突关系的实证研究

有关团队冲突和绩效的议题一直深受学术界和实践界关注。然而沟通作为引起和解决冲突的重要因素,尚未得到充分重视。通过文献梳理构建沟通与冲突的关系模型,基于178个工作团队的数据进行实证分析。结果发现沟通意愿和沟通方式对冲突和团队绩效影响显著,并且信任程度高的团队,沟通对冲突的影响更为强烈。团队领导者可以通过建立良好的沟通氛围来进行冲突管理,最终提高团队绩效。     

共享心智模式对团队创新绩效的影响机制研究——基于知识密集型服务业研发团队的实证分析

文章以知识密集型服务业研发团队为研究对象,通过四省103家知识密集型服务业150个研发团队的问卷调查,采用结构方程模型,实证研究研发团队共享心智模式对团队创新绩效的影响机制,研究发现:共享心智模式对团队创新绩效有显著影响,并且,团队沟通与团队冲突管理在共享心智模式与团队创新绩效的关系中发挥完全中介作用。因此,企业研发团队在开发共享心智模式的同时,必须注重团队过程的提升,才能有效提升团队整体创新绩效。