The impact of intra-team pay dispersion on team productivity is a highly discussed issue. On one hand, wage differentials provide incentives for higher employee effort. On the other hand, pay inequality discourages cooperation among team members, which reduces performance. Analyzing non-linear...

In 2002 the leading European football clubs reacted to the increasing player salaries by signing a voluntary agreement to limit player salaries to 70% of revenues. We analyze under which conditions a voluntary salary cap agreement is self-enforcing. Based on a simple model of a league with two...

Based on the competing theories of superstar formation proposed by Rosen (1981) and Adler (1985) it is controversial if firsthand observable talent or other factors like past consumption and popularity influence stardom. This article investigates the emergence of superstars in German soccer. We...

Existing studies about the determinants of the so-called couch potato audience in sports concentrate on the quality of the sporting contest which involves both the absolute playing strength of the competing teams and the relative evenness of the competition. Regarding national team competitions,...

Economic theories of superstar emergence concentrate on the perceived quality of the star’s performance. Thus superstars are identified by perceived talent superiority. Information technology and mass media have recently released a new type of stars: celebrities who are just known for being...

In this paper, we empirically investigate the performance effect of team-specific human capital in highly interactive teams. Based on the tenets of the resource-based view of the firm and on the ideas of typical learning functions, we hypothesize that team members’ shared experience in working...

Competitive advantage is based on a unique nexus of firm-specific investments that creates inimitable quasi-rents. Because of the impossibility of writing complete contracts, the distribution of the quasi-rents is vulnerable to opportunistic and inefficient behavior. This paper discusses two...

This study addresses the question how performance expectations affect involuntary managerial change. As we measure performance expectations based on highly efficient bookmaker odds, our specification is less subject to manipulations than the analyst forecasts employed in prior studies. Using...

The substantial literature on the relationship between demographic diversity and team performance yields weak and/or inconsistent results. Using match-level data of all games played in the German soccer league Bundesliga over six seasons, this paper analyzes age, race and tenure diversity of the...

Scenario studies in social psychology have shown that more negative feelings are attributed to negative outcomes following abnormal behavior than to the same negative outcomes caused by normal behavior. This study employs field data to test whether individuals avoid unconventional behavior in...