Economics: Research Guide

We consider T -round elimination tournaments where players have fixed and equal endowments. We establish conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a symmetric equilibrium for a general class of elimination tournaments. We provide examples illustrating the existence of multiple equilibria. Additionally, we show how equilibrium depends on the prizes scheme, and demonstrate that the winner-take-all prize scheme ensures equal resource allocation across all rounds.

Do narrow, or improbable, paths out of poverty, such as those in sports and entertainment, reduce the demand for schooling? We study the effect of professional baseball on educational attainment in the Dominican Republic, where all Major League Baseball (MLB) teams recruit teenage boys. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to MLB’s sudden entry into the Dominican Republic based on preexisting local baseball cultures and leverage the fact that girls are not recruited for baseball. Using difference-in-differences and triple-differences designs, we find that baseball has no measurable effect on school attendance, in contrast to highly publicized accounts.

This study investigates the impact of differences in consumers' racial preferences on worker productivity through the example of the home advantage (HA) effect using data on wins in men's professional tennis from 2001 to 2020 (pre-COVID-19). We identify players' racial affiliation as one of five distinct race groups by combining clustering algorithms and facial recognition software. Our empirical design innovates by allowing us to distinguish among HA factors related to the presence of fans, referee bias, travel fatigue, and home-court familiarity. We provide evidence of social environments where Black players benefit more strongly from fan support than players of other races.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that co-location with an English Premier League (EPL) football team can boost university recruitment. But when a town or city loses its EPL team, it also loses some of the world’s attention. We test whether the EPL limelight does in fact affect university recruitment in England and Wales. We exploit the sharp annual cutoff between survival and relegation from the EPL, comparing the admissions outcomes of universities that have clear name association either side of that discontinuity. On average, losing association with an EPL team, for just one year after its relegation, significantly reduces a university’s undergraduate year-to-year admissions growt..

In competitive settings, disparities in player strength are common. It is intuitively unclear whether a stronger player would opt for larger or smaller effort compared to weaker players. Larger effort could leverage their strength, while lower effort might be justified by their higher probability of winning regardless of effort. We analyze contests with three or more players, exploring when stronger players exert larger or lower effort. To rank efforts, it suffices to compare marginal utilities in situations where efforts are equal. Effort ranking depends on differences in hazard rates (which are smaller for stronger players) and reversed hazard rates (which are larger for stronger players)...

In competitive settings, disparities in player strength are common. It is intuitively unclear whether a stronger player would opt for larger or smaller effort compared to weaker players. Larger effort could leverage their strength, while lower effort might be justified by their higher probability of winning regardless of effort. We analyze contests with three or more players, exploring when stronger players exert larger or lower effort. To rank efforts, it suffices to compare marginal utilities in situations where efforts are equal. Effort ranking depends on differences in hazard rates (which are smaller for stronger players) and reversed hazard rates (which are larger for stronger players)...

National football teams increasingly issue tradeable blockchain-based fan tokens to strategically enhance fan engagement. This study investigates the impact of 2022 World Cup matches on the dynamic performance of each team's fan token. The event study uncovers fan token returns surged six months before the World Cup, driven by positive anticipation effects. However, intraday analysis reveals a reversal of fan token returns consistently declining and trading volumes rising as matches unfold. To explain findings, we uncover asymmetries whereby defeats in high-stake matches caused a plunge in fan token returns, compared to low-stake matches, intensifying in magnitude for knockout matches. Contr..

This article shows how coworker performance affects individual performance evaluation in a teamwork setting at the workplace. We use high-quality data on football matches to measure an important component of individual performance, shooting performance, isolated from collaborative effects. Employing causal machine learning methods, we address the assortative matching of workers and estimate both average and heterogeneous effects. There is substantial evidence for spillover effects in performance evaluations. Coworker shooting performance, meaningfully impacts both, manager decisions and third-party expert evaluations of individual performance. Our results underscore the significant role cowo..

Economic research on entertainment is scant despite its large share of time use. We test economic theories of belief-based utility in the context of video-game engagement. Using data on 2.8 million matches from League of Legends, we find evidence supporting reference-dependent preferences, loss aversion, preferences for surprise and suspense, preferences for clumped surprise, and flow theory from psychology. We then leverage our estimated model and an evolutionary algorithm to find the information-revealing process that maximizes player engagement. We find that the optimal version of the game has increased game play equivalent to 43% of the winner-loser gap.

We study the impact of time pressure on strategic risk-taking of professional chess players. We propose a novel machine-learning-based measure for the degree of strategic risk of a single chess move and apply this measure to the 2013-2023 FIDE Chess World Cups that allow for plausibly exogenous variation in thinking time. Our results indicate that time pressure leads chess players to opt for more risk-averse moves. We additionally provide correlational evidence for strategic loss aversion, a tendency for risky moves after a mistake/ in a disadvantageous position. This suggests that high-proficiency decision-makers in highstake situations react to time pressure and contextual factors more bro..

Organizations increasingly rely on teams to solve complex problems. The ability of teams to work well together is critical to their success. I experimentally test whether team performance is affected by whether team members like each other. I find that teams in which partners like each other do not outperform teams in which partners dislike each other. However, teams in which one partner likes the other more than the other perform best. The performance differences result directly from changes in collaborative behavior when learning the team partner's interpersonal preferences, not indirectly from interacting with different individuals. Participants do not anticipate this pattern and expect t..

La valorisation des droits audiovisuels des compétitions sportives est une variable clé de l'équilibre économique des clubs professionnels, notamment du football français. La capacité à dégager un prix satisfaisant des procédures de mise en concurrence pour l'attribution des droits va dépendre de l'intensité de la concurrence pour le marché et de la qualité intrinsèque de ces derniers pour les diffuseurs. Selon que les droits apparaîtront comme des ressources 'essentielles' (en d'autres termes incontournables pour les diffuseurs), premia ou aisément substituables avec d'autres contenus le résultat de l'enchère sera très différent. Il s'agit ici de s'interroger sur une év..

Boxing has a long-standing problem with biased judging, impacting both professional and Olympic bouts. ''Robberies'', where boxers are widely seen as being denied rightful victories, threaten to drive fans and athletes away from the sport. To tackle this problem, we propose a minimalist adjustment in how boxing is scored: the winner would be decided by the majority of round-by-round victories according to the judges, rather than relying on the judges' overall bout scores. This approach, rooted in social choice theory and utilising majority rule and middlemost aggregation functions, creates a coordination problem for partisan judges and attenuates their influence. Our model analysis and simul..

This paper examines the interdependence of international success and competitive balance of domestic sports competitions. More specifically, we apply the notion of the Herfindahl-Hirschman index to examine the effect of international rewards on distortion of competitive balance in domestic competitions and derive conditions under which the level of domestic competitive balance raises or falls. Our results yield interesting policy implications for the regulation of prize schemes in international competitions.

We follow workers' performance along an unbalanced panel dataset over multiple years and study how performance varies at the end of fixed-term contracts, in a labour market where some people face a mobility restricting clause (i.e., a noncompete clause). Focusing on the labour market of the National Hockey League, we analyse players' performance data and contracts with a fixed effect estimator to address empirical limitations in previous studies. We find that, on average, NHL players' performance does not vary. However, our estimations detect substantially heterogeneous behaviours, depending on tenure, perceived expected performance and mobility. Only younger players (i.e., restricted free-a..

There is a growing body of literature on the impact that COVID-19 has on workers' performance upon recovery. This paper explores that question using granular data from professional athletes. Using a difference-in-difference estimation strategy and estimating an n-dimensional performance index, we find that performance drops upon recovery during the first thirty days a????er infection by 13, 4%. Exploiting the mountainous geography of Colombia, our results indicate that the main driver of such a drop is performing at high altitudes.

Boxing has a long-standing problem with biased judging, impacting both professional and Olympic bouts. ''Robberies'', where boxers are widely seen as being denied rightful victories, threaten to drive fans and athletes away from the sport. To tackle this problem, we propose a minimalist adjustment in how boxing is scored: the winner would be decided by the majority of round-by-round victories according to the judges, rather than relying on the judges' overall bout scores. This approach, rooted in social choice theory and utilising majority rule and middlemost aggregation functions, creates a coordination problem for partisan judges and attenuates their influence. Our model analysis and simul..

Plusieurs travaux ont montré que la pratique du sport en compétition façonne les comportements, quel que soit le type de sport pratiqué. Exposés à une compétition intense, la tolérance au risque des athlètes serait amplifiée et leur envie de gagner constituerait le moteur fondamental qui les anime. Aurait-on là une voie permettant de réduire les écarts de genre ? Si les femmes développaient, grâce à la pratique du sport en compétition, un profil plus enclin à la prise de risque et à l'esprit de compétition, auraient-elles davantage d'opportunités d'emploi et des perspectives de revenus plus élevés ?

We seek to gain more insight into the effect of the crowds on the Home Advantage by analyzing the particular case of Argentinean football (also known as soccer), where for more than ten years, the visiting team fans were not allowed to attend the games. Additionally, during the COVID-19 lockdown, a significant number of games were played without both away and home team fans. The analysis of more than 20 years of matches of the Argentinean tournament indicates that the absence of the away team crowds was beneficial for the Top 5 teams during the first two years after their attendance was forbidden. An additional intriguing finding is that the lack of both crowds affects significantly all the ..

It is known that a player in a noncooperative game can benefit by publicly restricting his possible moves before play begins. We show that, more generally, a player may benefit by publicly committing to pay an external party an amount that is contingent on the game's outcome. We explore what happens when external parties -- who we call ``game miners'' -- discover this fact and seek to profit from it by entering an outcome-contingent contract with the players. We analyze various structured bargaining games between miners and players for determining such an outcome-contingent contract. These bargaining games include playing the players against one another, as well as allowing the players to pa..

Powered by the increasing predictive capabilities of machine learning algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) systems have begun to be used to overrule human mistakes in many settings. We provide the first field evidence this AI oversight carries psychological costs that can impact human decision-making. We investigate one of the highest visibility settings in which AI oversight has occurred: the Hawk-Eye review of umpires in top tennis tournaments. We find that umpires lowered their overall mistake rate after the introduction of Hawk-Eye review, in line with rational inattention given psychological costs of being overruled by AI. We also find that umpires increased the rate at which they c..

The fight against doping is organized at the global level under the aegis of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in application of the 2005 UNESCO convention which made the application of the World Anti-Doping Code mandatory for all countries wishing to participate and organize international sports competitions. In fact, it appears that for a variety of reasons, the application of the World Anti-Doping Code is largely theoretical in Africa. Indeed, if most African countries adhere to the system set up by WADA, it appears that very few are able to apply it effectively. The numerous difficulties that African countries may experience due to a degraded socioeconomic context confine anti-doping p..

We study the impact of external advice on the relative performance of chess players. We asked players in chess tournaments to evaluate positions in past games and allowed them to revise their evaluation following advice from a high or a low ability player. While our data confirms the theoretical prediction that high-quality advice has the potential to act as a “great equalizer, †reducing the difference between high and low ability players, this is not what happens in practice. This is in part because our subjects ignore too much of the advice they receive, but also because low ability players pay – either due to overconfidence or intrinsic preference – a higher premi..

This study investigates the economic impact of China’s “stadium diplomacy” in Sub-Saharan Africa. Exploiting the staggered timing of the construction in a difference-in-differences framework, we analyze the effect of Chinese-built and financed stadiums on local economic development. Employing nighttime light satellite data, we provide both an aggregate and spatially disaggregated assessment of these investments. We find that a stadium’s city nighttime light intensity increases by 25 percent, on average, after stadium completion. The stadium’s direct surrounding increases by 34 percent, on average, in its nighttime light activity. The effects can be attributed to the stadiums but ar..

Scoring rules are a popular method for aggregating rankings; they are frequently used in many settings, including social choice, information retrieval and sports. Scoring rules are parametrized by a vector of weights (the scoring vectors), one for each position, and declare as winner the candidate that maximizes the score obtained when summing up the weights corresponding to the position of each voter. It is well known that properly setting the weights is a crucial task, as different candidates can win with different scoring vectors. In this paper, we provide several methods to identify the winner considering all possible weights. We first propose VolumetricTop, a rule that ranks alternative..

We follow workers' performance along an unbalanced panel dataset over multiple years and study how performance varies at the end of fixed-term contracts, in a labour market where some people face a mobility restricting clause (i.e., a noncompete clause). Focusing on the labour market of the National Hockey League, we analyse players' performance data and contracts with a fixed effect estimator to address empirical limitations in previous studies. We find that, on average, NHL players' performance does not vary. However, our estimations detect substantially heterogeneous behaviours, depending on tenure, perceived expected performance, and mobility. Only younger players (i.e., restricted free-..

We test for skewness preferences in a large set of observational panel data on online poker games (n=4, 450, 585). Each observation refers to a choice between a safe option and a binary risk of winning or losing the game. Our setting offers a real-world choice situation with substantial incentives where probability distributions are simple, transparent, and known to the decision-makers. Individuals reveal a strong and robust preference for skewness, which is inconsistent with expected utility theory. The effect of skewness is most pronounced among experienced and unsuccessful players but remains significant in all subsamples that we investigate, in contrast to the effect of variance.

"Objective - This paper focuses on analyzing the significance of sports footwear brands by processing large text data from the Internet. In a modern environment, the brand distinguishes a company's products or services from those of its competitors. A strong brand can help build trust with customers as they perceive the brand as reliable and trustworthy. Methodology/Technique - The study uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) methods to analyze rich text content on the Internet. The research focus is based on the application of innovative methods to determine the importance and value of a brand using NLP techniques by analyzing the content of a large corpus of text originating from websites ..

Football is a sport that arouses enormous enthusiasm, transaction figures are increasingly exorbitant, European football clubs have a particular economic model, whose owners expectations are atypical. In this article we carry out an analysis of the income and expenses of the first division clubs of England, Spain, France, Germany and Italy, as well as a stock market analysis for a sample of four clubs belonging to these championships which are Manchester United, Olympique Lyonnais, Borussia Dortmund and Juventus which are clubs listed on the stock exchange. Financial performance is not always the ultimate goal of football investors; they may be motivated by other emotional factors that justi..

We propose a two-step guessing game to measure the depth of thinking. We apply this method to the P beauty contest game. Using our method, we find that 81% of subjects do not make choice following best response reasoning while the classical method would suggest only 12%. The result suggests that the classical method has the fundamental problem that it cannot distinguish if a submitted number is due to best response reasoning or not. It also suggests that traditional level k analysis falsely attributes some sophistication to random players, and that the degree of false attribution is large. Our procedure provides an alternative way to identify whether the individual has best response reasonin..