Governance of Professional Sports Leagues - Cooperatives versus Contracts

Helmut Dietl, Egon Franck, Tariq Hasan () and Markus Lang
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Tariq Hasan: Institute for Strategy and Business Economics, University of Zurich

No 59, Working Papers from University of Zurich, Institute for Strategy and Business Economics (ISU)

Abstract: Historically, European team sports leagues were run by their respective national and international associations and were legally independent from the professional clubs playing in these leagues. Recently, European leagues have adopted an organizational form similar to their North American counterparts who are organized since their beginning in a cooperative-like manner. Based on a comparative institutional analysis, we explain the advantages of the cooperative form of league organization over contractual governance. With our four-stage game-theoretic model, we show that contractual governance of sports leagues leads to larger investment distortions than cooperative league organization.

Keywords: Sports leagues; cooperative organization; contractual governance; hold up; bargaining (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D23 L14 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2006, Revised 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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http://repec.business.uzh.ch/RePEc/iso/ISU_WPS/59_ISU_full.pdf First version, 2006 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Governance of professional sports leagues--Cooperatives versus contracts (2009)
Working Paper: Governance of Professional Sports Leagues - Cooperatives versus Contracts (2007)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iso:wpaper:0059

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