The Run to the Pennant: A Multiple Equilibria Approach to Professional Sports Leagues

摘要

Sports economics is largely ignored in the United States. This is too bad, because the availability of rich and detailed data in sports offers great opportunities to test economic theories in labor, industrial organization, game theory, and other fields. I was once told by the president of a professional rock-paper-scissors league (yes, there are such things, and not only in the United States) that if he had a dollar for every game theorist who asked him for the play-by-play results of their competitions, he'd be a wealthy man. Sadly, they don't keep those records. But sports economists have used penalty kicking in soccer to determine whether players use mixed strategies, long-term contracts in baseball to examine shirking in principal-agent settings, and referee decisions in basketball and baseball to examine the impact of race on decision making. There are, of course, questions about the generalizability of these results to other settings, but the same can be said about papers on the child-bearing decisions of Malaysian women or the wage-setting behavior of Italian manufacturing firms.