Alternative Measures of Competitive Balance in Sports Leagues

Brad Humphreys

Journal of Sports Economics, 2002, vol. 3, issue 2, 133-148

Abstract: The most commonly used measures of competitive balance in sports leagues do not capture season-to-season changes in relative standings. This article describes an alternative measure of competitive balance, the Competitive Balance Ratio (CBR), that reflects team specific variation in winning percentage over time and league-specific variation. Based on estimation of a model of the determination of annual attendance in professional baseball during the past 100 years, variation in the CBR explains more of the observed variation in attendance than other alternatives measures of competitive balance, suggesting that CBR is a useful metric.

Date: 2002
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (149)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/152700250200300203 (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:3:y:2002:i:2:p:133-148

DOI: 10.1177/152700250200300203

Access Statistics for this article

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