We investigate the effect of new facilities on attendance in professional baseball, basketball, and football from 1969 to 2001. We find a strong, persistent effect in baseball and basketball, and little effect in football. Size and duration estimates imply that baseball teams sell 2,500,794 additional tickets over the first eight seasons, basketball teams 293,878 over the first nine seasons, an...

The paper presents an economic model of interaction between cricket boards, players and international club-line games sponsors like ICL or IPL. It attempts to capture the inherent conflict between such games and country-line games traditionally organized by cricket boards. It identifies the nature of various trade offs facing these ‘players’ in the game and examines the effects of market-size c...

Fifty years on we examine two key propositions in Neale’s (1964) “Peculiar Economics”: the need for competitors in sport to have opponents of similar ability in order to earn large revenues and the effect of frequent changes sports leagues’ standings on consumer demand. We develop a consumer choice model under uncertainty, and a structural econometric model, to motivate and test these ideas. Un...

This paper investigates biases in the perceptions of probabilities using data from the 1989 and 1994 seasons at the Woodlands greyhound park in Kansas City, Kansas. Results reveal consistent evidence that the gambler’s fallacy exists. The results also reveal that gamblers overestimate the probability of a win by the favorite and the dog in the “lucky” seven position. However, the comparison als...

The continued expansion of the casino industry has caused increasing concern regarding the cannibalization of other industries, and in particular, state lotteries. For example, Maryland Lottery sales flattened shortly after casinos began opening in the state. Although previous papers have found that casinos and lotteries have a negative relationship with each other, no previous research has ana...

This paper uses the model proposed by Chiappori, Levitt and Groseclose (2002) to test for mixed-strategy Nash equilibria in a game between a kicker and a goalkeeper, in a situation of a soccer penalty kick. The main contribution of this paper is to develop an alternative testing methodology, based on the use of a simultaneous-equation regression approach that directly tests the equilibrium cond...

Referee Bias This paper surveys the empirical literature on the behavior of referees in professional football and other sports. Referees are typically appointed by a principal to be impartial, especially when unbiased referee judgment is vital for the accomplishment of the principal’s objective. Answering whether referees make biased decisions and understanding the causes that lead referees to ...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of soccer performance on the clubs’ stock returns through an empirical analysis applied on Turkish case. The study is based on the data of Beşiktaş, Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe, considered “the big three” in Turkey. The sample period spans the period between 2005 to 2012. Multiple regression models are employed where the effect of performance on...

Empirical evidence about the relationship between legal gambling and crime is mixed; some studies find that legalized gambling increases crime and others find no relationship between legalized gambling and crime, controlling for other factors like hotels. We develop a utility maximizing model of time spent in legal work, crime, and leisure and use this model to understand the relationship betwe...