Incentives and Strategic Behavior of Professional Boxers

Zafer Akin, Murat Issabayev and Islam Rizvanoghlu

Journal of Sports Economics, 2023, vol. 24, issue 1, 28-49

Abstract: In professional boxing, a higher-ranked boxer chooses his opponent among challengers varying in popularity and strength. We build a three-stage model of a professional boxing fight between the chooser and a challenger to examine the strategic incentives of a chooser in sharing the purse and exerting a proper level of effort. More importantly, we endogenize the choice of the opponent and the purse to be generated. We found that an older chooser who is ready to cash in his reputation tends to choose a stronger opponent with little effort, while a young rising “star†prefers a match against weaker opponents.

Keywords: boxing; incentives; contests; opponent choice; bargaining; game theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15270025221100203 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Incentives and Strategic Behavior of Professional Boxers (2021)
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:24:y:2023:i:1:p:28-49

DOI: 10.1177/15270025221100203

Access Statistics for this article

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