Incentives and Strategic Behavior of Professional Boxers

Zafer Akin, Murat Issabayev and Islam Rizvanoghlu

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper studies the strategic behaviour of professional boxers in choosing the opponent and sharing the revenues generated by the fight. In professional boxing, a higher-ranked boxer has an upper hand in choosing his opponent among many challengers varying in popularity and strength. We build a three-stage model of a professional boxing fight/bout between the chooser and the one of his challengers to examine the strategic incentives of a chooser in sharing the purse in Nash Bargaining framework and exerting proper level of effort within a contest theory model. More importantly, we endogenize the choice of the opponent and thus the purse to be generated by the bout. We characterize the factors affecting the choice of an “optimal” opponent and the effort level exerted by the chooser and the opponent. One interesting result of the paper is that an older chooser who is ready to cash in his reputation tends to choose a stronger opponent, but puts little effort into the fight. On the other hand, a young rising “star” in the boxing market prefers a match against weaker opponents in order to minimize his risk of losing and to maximize his record of the “winning” outcomes along with market values.

Keywords: Boxing; incentives; contests; opponent choice; bargaining; game theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-11-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-ore, nep-spo and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/110595/1/MPRA_paper_110595.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Incentives and Strategic Behavior of Professional Boxers (2023)
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:pra:mprapa:110595

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().