For the love of football? Using economic models of volunteering to study the motives of German football referees

Eike Emrich, Christian Pierdzioch and Christian Rullang

No 16, Working Papers of the European Institute for Socioeconomics from European Institute for Socioeconomics (EIS), Saarbrücken

Abstract: Using data for a large sample of German football referees, we studied the motives for becoming a football referee. Based on a long modeling tradition in the literature on the economics of volunteering, we studied altruistic motives (public-goods model) versus non-altruistic (egoistic private-consumption motives and human-capital motives). We differentiated between self-attributed and other-attributed motives. We found that altruistic motives on average are less strong than other motives. Other-attributed altruistic motives are stronger than self-attributed altruistic motives, indicating the presence of a self-interest bias. We further found that referees who report strong altruistic motives have a higher willingness to quit refereeing when other referees would referee more matches, consistent with the public-goods model. In line with the human-capital model, altruistic motives are stronger for senior referees. Altruistic motives are also stronger for those referees who view refereeing as a volunteer activity.

Keywords: socioeconomics of volunteering; survey data; football; motives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:eiswps:16

DOI: 10.22028/D291-27038

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