Suspense: Dynamic Incentives in Sports Contests

William Chan, Pascal Courty and Hao Li

Economic Journal, 2009, vol. 119, issue 534, 24-46

Abstract: In a dynamic model of sports competition, if spectators care only about contestants' efforts, incentive schemes depending linearly on the final score difference dominate rank order schemes based only on who wins. If spectators also care about suspense, defined as valuing more contestants' efforts when the game is closer, rank order schemes can dominate linear score difference schemes, and this will be the case when the demand for suspense is sufficiently high. Under additional assumptions, we show that the optimal rank order scheme dominates a broad class of incentive schemes. Copyright © The Author(s). Journal compilation © Royal Economic Society 2009.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:ecj:econjl:v:119:y:2009:i:534:p:24-46

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... al.asp?ref=0013-0133

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Journal is currently edited by Martin Cripps, Steve Machin, Woulter den Haan, Andrea Galeotti, Rachel Griffith and Frederic Vermeulen

More articles in Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley-Blackwell Digital Licensing () and Christopher F. Baum ().