Compromising to share the revenues from broadcasting sports leagues

The Organization of Sports Leagues

Sports leagues have been organized in many different ways. This essay examines the incentive structure and efficiency of different forms of league organization, including the methods for scheduling games, admitting new members, and making operational decisions. This article also compares operations and outcomes in Europe and North America, and concludes that the European system of promotion and...

Referee Assignment in Sports Leagues

Optimization in sports is a field of increasing interest. Combinatorial optimization techniques have been applied e.g. to game scheduling and playoff elimination. A common problem usually found in sports management is the assignment of referees to games already scheduled. There are a number of rules and objectives that should be taken into account when referees are assigned to games. We address...

Back to the game: how Congress can help sports leagues shift the focus from steroids to sports.

Optimal gate revenue sharing in sports leagues

Sports leagues constitute one of the few examples of legally operating cartels. In this paper I examine how gate revenue sharing may serve to coordinate talent investments within these cartels. I show that sharing revenues has the potential to raise cartel profits, because it decreases the incentive to invest in playing talent. Leagues consisting of teams with heterogeneous local markets should...

Teaching competition in professional sports leagues

In recent years there has been some dispute over the appropriate way to model decisionmaking in professional sports leagues. In particular, Szymanski and Kesenne (2004), argue that formulating the decision-making problem as a noncooperative game leads to radically different conclusions about the nature of competition in sports leagues. This paper describes a simulation model that van be used in...