This paper develops a contest model of a professional sports league in which clubs maximize a weighted sum of profits and wins (utility maximization). The model analyzes how more win-oriented behavior of certain clubs affects talent investments, competitive balance, and club profits. Moreover,...

Most articles on sports economics presume the well-known Nash equilibrium concept. In this article, however, we apply evolutionary game theory in a sports-contest model. If clubs follow evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS), then ESS generate greater investments and smaller profits than...

This article presents a model of talent investments where two clubs compete for prizes. Our model is based on a general class of cost functions with a constant elasticity of marginal costs with respect to investments. The analysis finds that reduced revenue sharing improves competitive balance....

In the December 2002 issue of the American Economic Review, Mark Duggan and Steven D. Levitt published an article on corruption in professional sumo. In the present article, the authors update the study of Duggan and Levitt to take into account changes since January 2000. The authors find strong...