The Hope Statistic as an Alternative Measure of Competitive Balance

Alan Kaplan (), John Nadeau () and Norm O’Reilly ()
Additional contact information
Alan Kaplan: Ryerson University
John Nadeau: Nipissing University
Norm O’Reilly: University of Ottawa

International Journal of Sport Finance, 2011, vol. 6, issue 2, 170-184

Abstract: We examine the need for and the presence of competitive balance in professional sports leagues. We argue that competitive balance helps to further fan welfare and we propose a new measure of competitive balance that hopefully better reflects the needs of fans—that is, compared with measures used both currently and in the past. More specifically, we model the hope of postseason play in a new way as a proxy for competitive balance, and, using a database from Major League Baseball, we provide descriptive statistics for our measure alongside a number of other measures currently extant in the literature. We conclude by discussing policy positions that may be derived from our findings.

Keywords: sport finance; competitive balance; major league baseball; hope; shareholder wealth; fan welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.fitinfotech.com/IJSF/IJSFbackissueWVU.tpl (text/html)
Full-text download requires subscription from FIT.

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:jsf:intjsf:v:6:y:2011:i:2:p:170-184

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.fitinfote ... IJSFbackissueWVU.tpl

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Sport Finance is currently edited by Arne Feddersen, Babatunde Buraimo, Joachim Prinz and Jane Ruseski

More articles in International Journal of Sport Finance from Fitness Information Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Victor Matheson ().