Experts' voting behavior is conjectured to be more objective than peer voting (own group/peers) and public voters (everyone interested), who are supposedly influenced by all sorts of subjective aspects. We examine differences in voting behavior between these groups by analyzing the voting...

In the NBA, predominantly Black players play in front of predominantly non-Black fans. Using the 'NBA bubble', a natural experiment induced by COVID-19, we show that the performance of Black players improved significantly with the absence of fans vis-'a-vis White players. This is consistent with...

We study how workers in production teams are affected by the temporary absence and replacement of a coworker. When a substitute coworker is absent, the remaining coworkers produce less output per working time. They compensate for this by increasing their working time at the expense of the (less...

We study how workers in production teams are affected by the temporary absence and replacement of a coworker. When a substitute coworker is absent, the remaining coworkers produce less output per working time. They compensate for this by increasing their working time at the expense of the (less...

Scheduling factors such as a visiting team playing a game back-to-back against a rested home team can affect the win probability of the teams for that game and potentially affect teams unevenly throughout the season. This study examines schedule inequity in the National Basketball Association...

Ticket sales remain a significant source of revenue in professional team sports. However, season ticket revenue, as an effective risk-reducing instrument, is rarely analyzed in the literature. This study aims to determine, from a price and product perspective, the extent to which different...

Recent theoretical and empirical work characterizes attention as a limited resource that decision-makers strategically allocate. There has been less research on the dynamic interdependence of attention: how paying attention now may affect performance later. In this paper, we exploit...

We analyze the impact of psychological pressure on individual performance with handball penalties thrown in the decisive stage vs. the rest of the game. Contrary to the phenomenon of choking under pressure, we observe that most of the analyzed players perform best when it matters the most. The...

This paper examines the growing trend of NFL players to forego participation in the league's yearly All-Star Game, the Pro Bowl. Viewership of the Pro Bowl has been substantially lower than the average game day in recent years, causing controversial discussions about the viability of the game...

We investigate the hot hand hypothesis using detailed data on free throws and field goal attempts for the 2004-2005 through 2015-2016 NBA regular seasons. Free throws represent a more controlled setting, allowing a closer examination of the potential physiological mechanisms behind success in...

Cricket game is like a religion in India which has a huge fan following. According to the market research conducted by the International Cricket Council (ICC), cricket has over a billion fans across the world with the Indian alone constituting around 90 percent of them. Therefore, cricket is big...

Can raising awareness of racial bias subsequently reduce that bias? We address this question by exploiting the widespread media attention highlighting racial bias among professional basketball referees that occurred in May 2007 following the release of an academic study. Using new data, we...

This paper examines how the effort choices of workers within the same firm interact with each other. In contrast to the existing literature, we show that workers can affect the productivity of their co-workers based on income maximization considerations, rather than relying on behavioral...

Major League Baseball faced increased competition from radio broadcasts and improvements in motion pictures during the 1920s and 1930s. The "Roaring Twenties" were followed by the Great Depression. As social norms changed, some owners fought for the right to stage home games on Sundays. Owners...

Game theory makes strong predictions about how individuals should behave in two player, zero sum games. When players follow a mixed strategy, equilibrium payoffs should be equalized across actions, and choices should be serially uncorrelated. Laboratory experiments have generated large and...

This paper examines the determinants of head coaching salaries in men’s and women’s collegiate soccer. Both of these sports are considered non-revenue sports, and thus differences in sports revenues should not impact coaching salaries. We analyze salaries of head coaches in these sports to...

Hedging stakes in cricket is the need of the hour, for it no longer restricts its claims to league owners and cricket associations, independent teams and individual players. Financial, economic and social stakes today extend to the general public and government who happen to patronise the game...

We examine the effect of contract-based incentives on the performance of NBA players using data from the 2004-05 to 2014-15 seasons. We find support for a contract year effect, meaning that players in the last season of their current contract improve their performance in order to secure better...

Major League Baseball (MLB) uses final offer arbitration (FOA) to set the salaries of certain players. In FOA, the team and the player each submits a proposed salary number, and the arbitrator (in MLB's case, a panel of three arbitrators) is required to select one of the numbers as the award....

Overall attendance at bowl games has steadily decreased since 2010, meaning that institutions are often left with tickets they cannot sell. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the drivers of spectator attendance at college football bowl games through four competing econometric models....

A nonparametric analysis of player plate appearances (PA) in the 2018 Major League Baseball (MLB) season provides no evidence of a batter hot hand. Players with more than 100 PAs in the 2018 season are analyzed using one-sided permutation tests stratified by player. Based on recent literature,...

The U.S. Supreme Court exempted Major League Baseball from the Sherman Antitrust Act. As a result, debuting players are still precluded from switching teams, rendering owners de facto monopsonies. By how much does this lower wages? Using a quasi-random discontinuity in the rule determining...

Many industries are impacted by "superstars," where a select few individuals add tremendous economic value. This paper estimates fan willingness-to-pay for superstars in the National Basketball Association, and, in particular, distinguishes between demand for player skill versus player...

This paper examines the role of collateral in "sudden stop" models that feature occasionally binding constraints and endogenous growth. We show how different assumptions regarding the nature and valuation of collateral alter the dynamics of crisis episodes and the welfare costs of pecuniary...

Federal authorities recently shocked college basketball stakeholders, the general public, legal analysts, and the NCAA by investigating and bringing federal criminal charges against men's college basketball coaches, individuals associated with Adidas, and athlete advisors for their involvement...

Intercollegiate amateur athletics in the US largely bars student-athletes from sharing in any of the profits generated by their participation, which creates substantial economic rents for universities. These rents are primarily generated by men's football and men's basketball programs. We...

Intercollegiate amateur athletics in the US largely bars student-athletes from sharing in any of the profits generated by their participation, which creates substantial economic rents for universities. These rents are primarily generated by men's football and men's basketball programs. We...

This paper uses auction theory to explain the unique design of the 1998-2013 posting system agreed to between Major League Baseball and the Japanese Nippon Professional Baseball League that allowed for the transfer of baseball players from Japan to the United States. It has some similarities and...

Purpose The National Football League (NFL), the most lucrative sports league in the world, has its second largest foreign audience in Brazil. Its Brazilian broadcasts stimulate the audience to extrapolate television reception and interact through a social media platform, seeking to integrate a...

We study human capital reallocation following firm-specific idiosyncratic shocks. Theory offers diverging predictions as to whether human capital gets reallocated to its most productive use following these shocks. To empirically test these predictions, we focus on relegation battles in the...