The Louis–Schmelling Paradox and the League Standing Effect Reconsidered

Brad Humphreys and Li Zhou ()

Journal of Sports Economics, 2015, vol. 16, issue 8, 835-852

Abstract: Fifty years on we examine two key propositions in Neale’s “Peculiar Economics†: The need for competitors in sport to have opponents of similar ability in order to earn large revenues and the effect of frequent changes sports leagues’ standings on consumer demand. We develop a consumer choice model under uncertainty, and a structural econometric model, to motivate and test these ideas. Unfortunately, neither receives much empirical or theoretical support relative to alternative factors affecting consumer choice like loss aversion and home win preference.

Keywords: reference-dependent preferences; outcome uncertainty; league standing effect; Louis–Schmelling paradox (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1527002515587260 (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:16:y:2015:i:8:p:835-852

DOI: 10.1177/1527002515587260

Access Statistics for this article

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