RE: Analysis of "conditions of contest" in sports economics

Oh, and one random factlet which has fascinated me ever since it was
mentioned at a WEA sports economics presentation a few years ago:
professional soccer leagues in Europe do not have roster limits. They
can hire as many players as they wish. Compare that to American pro
sports, where there are strict and often elaborate limits on how many
players you can have on say a football roster, or major league
baseball's 25-man roster (as well as its 40-man roster, plus injured
reserve lists), etc. Even college sports have limits on the number of
scholarships they can give out, though most of them do not have roster
limits AFAIK.

I haven't been able to think through the implications or reasons for
this difference; it's easy to understand why roster limits can be a good
idea, to encourage competitive balance. I conjecture that relegation
might be important: European soccer teams are not guaranteed a place in
their "premier" leagues; the worst-performing teams each season get
relegated to a lower league while the best lower-league teams get
promoted to the premier league. So that may provide a source of
competition, and competitive balance, that American pro sports lack and
must compensate for via roster limits.

--MKT

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Tamada [mailto:tamada_at_oxy.edu]
Sent: Monday, September 25, 2006 5:52 PM
To: Coffin, Donald A; tch-econ_at_elon.edu
Subject: RE: Analysis of "conditions of contest" in sports economics

I don't have a lot of citations, in general I think operations research
journals seem to have more of this kind of article than the journals in
other fields. It's an interesting topic, related of course to
tournament theory.

Here's a labor economics article which gets at the notion of
winning-by-losing, although not in the sense that you are probably
thinking of (NBA teams which finish with poor records can get good draft
choices):

Losing to Win: Tournament Incentives in the National Basketball
Association
Author(s) Beck A. Taylor and Justin G. Trogdon
Identifiers Journal of Labor Economics, volume 20 (2002), pages
23-41
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10.1086/323930

Here's an article which I think is about tournaments only, as opposed to
sports leagues with seasons:

Efficacy of traditional sport tournament structures
Authors: McGarry T.1; Schutz R.W.1
Source: Journal of the Operational Research Society, Volume 48, Number
1, 1 January 1997, pp. 65-74(10)
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

And the notion of winning-by-losing is common in team tennis, where
coaches have an incentive to "sandbag": match their best player against
the opponent's second best, their second best against the opponent's
third best, etc., while sending their WORST player against the
opponent's #1, to be the sacrificial lamb while the rest of the team
gets an advantage. Major league baseball managers may face the same
incentive; I've seen some informal research on the web which says that
they rarely seem to do this. At one point I found online some
decades-old rules from a tennis coaching association or tennis club
where sandbagging was explicitly mentioned (and prohibited), but I can't
find them now.

And of course perusing the Journal of Sports Economics is probably a
good idea.
http://jse.sagepub.com/

--MKT

-----Original Message-----
From: Coffin, Donald A [mailto:dcoffin_at_iun.edu]
Sent: Monday, September 25, 2006 10:29 AM
To: tch-econ_at_elon.edu
Subject: Analysis of "conditions of contest" in sports economics

As a part of my sports economics class upcoming in the spring, I have
decided to spend more time on "conditions of contest"--how we decide who
has won a sporting event.

For example, the major team sports in the US play in a
modified-round-robin-followed-by-an-elimination-tournament format.
Tennis is purely an elimination tournament (although there is apparently
some discussion about moving some women's tournaments to a
round-robin/elimination format). Golf is different; I'm not quite sure
how to characterize it. I'm not very familiar with European football
leagues and how championships get determined.

What I'm looking for is an analysis of the performance-incentive effects
of different "conditions of contest." (One particular interest is under
what conditions a team can improve its chances of winning the
championship by losing an individual game/match.) Any suggestions?

Don Coffin
Indiana University Northwest
Received on Wed Sep 27 2006 - 13:33:44 EDT