Modelling Professional Sports Leagues: An Industrial Organization Approach

摘要

This paper outlines a simple model of professional sports contests that can provide a number of useful insights into the operations of professional sports leagues. The model incorporates a concern for competitive balance on the part of fans and has the advantage that a number of league market structures can be analyzed using standard industrial organization techniques. The model can also be used to determine the effect of a number of league rules including revenue sharing, payroll caps, and luxury taxes on the respective demands for talented players. In addition, it can be shown that " the model of professional sports contests developed here has a useful parallel with a standard model of differentiated products.