Testing for competitive balance

Lee Scyoc and M Kevin McGee
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Lee Scyoc: University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh

Empirical Economics, 2016, vol. 50, issue 3, No 15, 1029-1043

Abstract: Abstract We present two tests for the hypothesis that a league is competitively balanced, identifying in each case the appropriate statistic as well as its sampling distribution. We then apply these tests to Major League Baseball and the National Football League. We demonstrate how these tests can be applied to full sports leagues, or to just intradivisional play, and to both single season and multiple season outcomes. We also show how one of our statistics is related to existing measures of competitive balance, and note the possibility that, because our statistics have known sampling distributions, knowledge may ultimately allow them to be transformed into measures that are comparable between leagues of different sizes and season lengths.

Keywords: Sports; Sampling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C46 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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DOI: 10.1007/s00181-015-0968-1

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