The Ebbs and Flows of the Game: Multiple Equilibria in a Sports League Model

Duane Rockerbie and Stephen Easton

Journal of Sports Economics, 2010, vol. 11, issue 2, 172-185

Abstract: The history of professional sports leagues is rich with examples of clubs that enjoy success on the field for a number of seasons, only to fall back in subsequent seasons. Although some clubs achieve consistent success, and a few, consistent failure, most clubs display a cyclical pattern as they ‘‘make a run’’ for success, then take fallback positions. This behavior is difficult to explain using the now standard league model of Fort and Quirk. In this article, the authors discuss the likelihood of this cyclical behavior emerging in the standard model and then develop an extension to the model, which can generate movements between good (team success) and bad (team failure) equilibria. The authors then discuss the stability conditions for each equilibrium and the conditions under which a club might find one of these equilibria unsustainable in the long run.

Keywords: sports league; multiple equilibria; spillover effects; baseball (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1527002510363102 (text/html)

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:sae:jospec:v:11:y:2010:i:2:p:172-185

DOI: 10.1177/1527002510363102

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Sports Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().