This study points out that changes in the format of the playoffs in the National Basketball Association have had the effect of lengthening the championship series and reducing the variance in the length of the series. These are valuable goals for the organization because they provide higher...

This paper describes the problem specification searches pose for inference, presents the results of some simulations for purposes of illustration, and uses the bootstrapping procedure to give a better estimate of statistical significance than a standard t-test. The value of the illustrations of...

The present paper investigates whether popular measures of economic freedom used in regression analyses by development economists and others are one dimensional. Using the indices provided by the Fraser Institute, Heritage/Wall Street Journal, and Heritage and Freedom House, a principal...

This study extends prior research on referee bias and close bias in professional soccer by examining whether Major League Soccer (MLS) referees’ discretion over stoppage time (i.e., extra play beyond regulation) is influenced by end-of-regulation match scores and/or home field advantage. To do...

Using the political-economic history of the development of telephony during the 1870s as a backdrop, this paper studies a two-player Tullock contest that includes both research effort (R&D) and legal effort (<i>i.e.</i>, rent-seeking effort). The two types of efforts complement each other and...

We offer a new approach to investigate hypothetical bias in contingent valuation using a latent choice multinomial logit model. To develop this model, we extend Dempster, Laird, and Rubin's 1977 work on the expectations maximization algorithm to the estimation of a multinomial logit model with...

Wedevelop a multinomial logitmodel with missing information that can be used to test for hidden alternatives in random utility models and contingent valuation analysis. To illustrate our latentchoice technique, we focus on the “don’t know” responses in dichotomous choice contingent...

The most persistently troubling empirical result in the contingent valuation method literature is the tendency for hypothetical willingness to pay to overestimate real willingness to pay. We suggest a new approach to test and correct for hypothetical bias using a latent choice multinomial logit...