The Peculiar Externalities of Professional Team Sports

James D. Whitney

Economic Inquiry, 2005, vol. 43, issue 2, 330-343

Abstract: The economics literature has long been divided regarding whether competing sports teams can achieve the same, efficient allocation of playing skills that a revenue-maximizing league monopolist would choose despite the external effects the teams impose on each other in their pursuit of athletic talent. In this article an explicit consideration of the arbitrage incentives that underlie the marketing and pricing of playing skills indicates that decentralized franchises generally fail to allocate talent efficiently. For fans concerned about the championship prospects of their preferred team, the popular complaint has merit: "Big-city teams win too much."(JEL L83) Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

JEL-codes: L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ei/cbi022 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:ecinqu:v:43:y:2005:i:2:p:330-343

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Inquiry is currently edited by Preston McAfee

More articles in Economic Inquiry from Western Economic Association International Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().