Christian Deutscher

Sabotage in Tournaments with Heterogeneous Contestants: Empirical Evidence from the Soccer Pitch

In this paper, we address the problem of sabotage in tournaments with heterogeneous contestants. In a first step, we develop a formal model, which yields the prediction that favorites exert higher productive effort, while underdogs are more tempted to engage in destructive actions (sabotage). This is because favorites have a higher return on productive effort and both types of effort are substitutes. In a second step, we use data from German professional soccer to test this prediction. In line with the model, we find that favorite teams win more tackles in a fair way, while underdog teams commit more fouls.

Performance under pressure: estimating the returns to mental strength in professional basketball

Abstract Human capital theory, one of the cornerstones of modern labor and personnel economics, posits that individual salaries are a function of a persons skills and abilities. Irrespective of its undisputed theoretical importance and practical relevance, the empirical evidence on the impact of personality traits and characteristics on salaries, however, remains limited and inconclusive because most of the existing literature is based on self-reported questionnaire responses. Therefore, we include in our estimations not only the ‘traditional’ measures of a persons human capital, but also analyze the impact of an individuals personality traits that have so far been mostly neglected in the context of income determination. We avoid the ‘subjectivity bias’ that has been criticized in the previous literature and use an unbalanced panel including approximately 200 professional basketball players from the National Basketball Association in the four seasons 2003/2004–2006/2007. With this kind of secondary data we estimate standard Mincer-type earnings functions as well as more advanced quantile regressions. Our findings document a statistically significant and economically considerable impact of ‘mental strength’ on player salaries.

Does Performance Consistency Pay Off Financially for Players? Evidence From the Bundesliga

The purpose of the current study is to investigate how consistency of professional soccer players’ performance affects salaries in the German Bundesliga. Using game-level data for five consecutive seasons (n = 34,413 player–match day observations), we find empirical evidence for a salary premium to players showing volatility in performance. Applying ordinary least squares, fixed-effects as well as quantile regression analyses, this effect remains robust.

The payoff to leadership in teams.

In team sports, as well as in other group productions, some individuals are asked to show leadership skills. Although it is assumed that this ability is compensated monetarily, there is a lack of empirical evidence for this common thesis. Because in professional sports the team captains are expected to possess these leadership skills, this article will explore the impact of this ability on the salary. Controlling for individual player characteristics and performance indicators for players from the National Hockey League, the author shows that leadership ability is rewarded pecuniary by a wage premium between 21% and 35%.

The Economics of Corruption in Sports: The Special Case of Doping

Corruption in general and doping in particular are ubiquitous in both amateur and professional sports and have taken the character of a systemic threat. In creating unfair advantages, doping distorts the level playing field in sporting competition. With higher stakes involved, such distortions create negative externalities not only on the individual level (e.g. lasting health damages) but also frictions on the aggregate level (e.g. loss of media interest) and erode the principle of sports. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive literature overview of the individual drivers to dope, the concomitant detrimental effects and respective countermeasures. In explaining the athlete’s motivation to use performance enhancing drugs, we enrich the discussion by adapting insights from behavioral economics. These insights help to understand such an athlete’s decision beyond a clear-cut rationale but rather as a product of the interaction with the underlying environment. We stress that in order to ensure clean sports and fair competition, more sophisticated measurement methods have to be evolved and the respective data made publicly available in order to facilitate more extensive studies in the future. So far, the lack of data is alarming, especially in the area of elite sports where the stakes are high and doping has a substantial influence.

Does Violence in Professional Ice Hockey Pay? Cross Country Evidence from Three Leagues

Hockey is inherently a rough, physical game. We analyze the impact of physical violence on the success of professional hockey clubs from the highest leagues in North America, Finland, and Germany. Using penalty min as an indicator of violence, the evidence is that incurring penalties will not improve the team’s points and may even reduce them. Actual fights between players are linked to reductions in team points in the National Hockey League (North America). Nor is attendance clearly greater at the home games of highly penalized clubs, though weak evidence of such a relationship is found for the German Ice Hockey League. Team revenues are available only for the North American league, and there is also weak evidence that more penalized teams earn greater revenues.

Productivity and New Audiences: Empirical Evidence From Professional Basketball

Changing clubs in professional sports lets a player face a new supportive crowd during home games, hence the question arises how performance is impacted by changing teams. This article measures the impact of the changed audience on free throw shooting performance. The data set includes all free throw attempts for 10 seasons from the National Basketball Association (NBA) and distinguishes between home and away games. Results support the idea that only free agents who were able to select a new team worsened their performance due to social pressure experienced during home games, while the performance during away games is unaffected. They suggest that especially bad free throw shooters suffer from facing this additional pressure.

Betting market inefficiencies are short-lived in German professional football

ABSTRACT In this article, we argue that potential inefficiencies on betting markets are more likely to exist at the very beginning of a season, when the available information on the teams’ playing strength is difficult to evaluate. This lack of reliable information should be particularly large in the case of recently promoted teams that have typically undergone major changes in the composition of their roster following their promotion. Without any information on the latter teams’ potential performance, they are particularly difficult to evaluate, which may eventually lead to inefficiencies and positive returns on investment in the betting market. We analyse odds from German first division Bundesliga soccer for the seasons from 2002/03 to 2015/16 to find betting market inefficiencies at the start of the season. As expected, betting on recently promoted team wins generates temporarily positive returns, especially for away games. These results suggest bookmakers to underestimate promoted teams’ ability to familiarize with the conditions in the new league, such as having to play in front of larger, often hostile crowds.

Match Fixing and Sports Betting in Football: Empirical Evidence from the German Bundesliga

Corruption in sports represents an important challenge to their integrity. Corruption can take many forms, including match fixing by players, referees, or team officials. Match fixing can be difficult to detect. We use a unique data set to analyze variation in bet volume on Betfair, a major online betting exchange, for evidence of abnormal patterns associated with specific referees who officiated matches. An analysis of 1,251 Bundesliga 1 football matches from 2010/11 to 2014/15 reveals evidence that bet volume in the Betfair markets in these matches was systematically higher for four referees relative to matches officiated by other referees. Our results are robust to alternative specifications and are thus suggestive of potentially existing match fixing and corruption in the German Bundesliga.

Substitution in Sports: The Case of Lower Division Football Attendance

Commercialization processes in European football are facilitated by reducing concurrent games within the leagues and reallocating kickoff times to prime time slots abroad. Consequently, the number of top division games that temporally overlap with lower division games has increased significantly during recent years. By using attendance data of around 6,000 games in Germany’s fourth division, this article is the first to empirically test whether such overlaps have any adverse demand effects for lower division games. Fixed effects panel regressions reveal that overlapping games indeed reduce the demand for lower division games, suggesting some negative spillovers of commercialization processes in football.