Betting scandals and attenuated property rights - How betting related match fixing can be prevented in future

Recently, a number of high-profile betting scandals have shocked European football. Since such scandals threaten the integrity of the sport, which is one of its major assets, football officials have taken prominent measures to avoid further scandals. Unfortunately, these measures have not yet been successful. Additional or different measures seem to be necessary to protect the integrity of the sport. In this paper we analyze the economic causes of betting scandals from a property rights perspective. The analysis consists of three parts. First, we show that after a continuous attenuation of property rights over the last decades, football fixtures and results today are a costless input for the business model of the large industry of bookmakers and betting platforms. In the second part, we explain the economic responses of the betting industry to the property rights attenuation and the resulting facilitation of betting scandals. In the third part, we evaluate three alternative solutions to the problem: taxation, regulation, and property rights allocation and enforcement. The third approach is especially promising and has been successfully used in other industries as well.