The allocation of rewards in athletic contests
B Frick and
R Simmons
No 591160, Working Papers from Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department
Abstract:
Similar to most top-tier matches in professional basketball, baseball and soccer, high-level competitions in individualistic sports, such as the tennis tournaments of Wimble-don and Flushing Meadows, the golf tournaments of Augusta and St. Andrews, as well as the marathons of New York and London attract not only thousands of spectators, but also a TV audience of millions of fans. Moreover, these (and other) individualistic sports have recently received increased attention also from economists trying to test a number of hypotheses that can be derived from "tournament theory" or - as a synonym - from "contest theory". The chapter is structured as follows: We first provide a brief description of the development of prize money levels and structures in the three different individual sports men-tioned in the previous paragraph (and, consequently, athletes’ incomes over the last years (section 2). We then summarize the basic insights and the core predictions of tour-nament/contest theory (section 3) and review the available literature on the incentive effects of tournament pay systems in athletic contests (section 4). Finally, section 5 concludes and raises some of the questions that have not been answered yet and that should, therefore, be dealt with in future research.
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-univers ... AthleticContests.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lan:wpaper:591160
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giorgio Motta ().