Sports leagues constitute one of the few examples of legally operating cartels. In this paper I examine how gate revenue sharing may serve to coordinate talent investments within these cartels. I show that sharing revenues has the potential to raise cartel profits, because it decreases the...

In this note I estimate and compare Tullock- and Hirshleifer-style contest success functions (CSFs) using data from the 4 major American sports leagues. I find that Tullock CSFs based on relative efforts fit the data better than Hirshleifer CSFs based on absolute effort differences.

Hosting a major international sporting event is a costly affair for the organizing country. Growth in tourism is often cited as one of the economic benefits, which should allow the host to earn back these costs. In this paper we use monthly country-by-country arrival data to assess the impact of...

In 2010 UEFA, the governing body of European soccer, announced a set of financial restraints, that clubs must observe when seeking to enter its competitions, notably the UEFA Champions League. We characterize these “Financial Fair Play” (FFP) regulations as a form of vertical restraint and...

As sports clubs jointly produce contests, they cannot determine contest quality through their private talent investments. Sports leagues therefore try to coordinate talent investments to- wards the pro.t-maximizing contest quality. In this paper I analyze how revenue sharing mech- anisms may...

Collective sales of media rights are a common practice in sports leagues. Proponents of the system claim that it is a necessary tool for the maintenance of competitive balance. In this empirical paper, I argue that, in European soccer, collective sales do not increase competitive balance as...

This paper shows that under reasonable conditions that increasing gate revenue sharing among teams in a sports league will produce a more uneven contest, i.e. reduce competitive balance. This result has significant implications for antitrust authorities and legislators, who have tended to assume...

In this paper, we try to show that, apart from the negative impact of the Champions League, the growing gap between the Big 5 football countries in Europe and the smaller countries is caused by the deregulation of the European player labour market without deregulating the European football...