The Incentive Effects of Leveling the Playing Field - An Empirical Analysis of Amateur Golf Tournaments

Jörg Franke

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Abstract: Leveling the playing field is an important policy instrument to guarantee an equitable competition among heterogeneous individuals. However, the incentive effects of those policies are usually not explicitly addressed in empirical studies. In this paper the performance in amateur golf tournaments is analyzed to gain insights into the incentive effects of those types of policies. The empirical analysis takes advantage of the fact that tournaments in amateur golf are of two distinctive types that apply different scoring rules: While one scoring rule is based on gross scores, i.e. the total number of strokes of a player, the second scoring rule is based on net scores where the total number of strokes is normalized with respect to the respective player's handicap. Performance comparisons of players that participated in both types of tournaments suggest that leveling the playing field, as in tournaments based on net score, has positive and significant performance effects.

Keywords: Social; Sciences; &; Humanities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-02-16
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00670763
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Applied Economics, 2011, pp.1. ⟨10.1080/00036846.2010.537646⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00670763

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2010.537646

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