The tourism industry has traditionally been the leading sector of economy Georgian Black Sea resort Batumi for many decades and is currently experiencing rapid growth. This trend accompanied by an increase in investment activities constructions rental accommodations. Developers are focusing on promoting their rooms apartments, positioning them as a source long-term income, while potential priva...

This paper studies how national sentiment in the form of either a perception or a loyalty bias of bettors may affect pricing patterns on national wagering markets for international sport events. We show theoretically that both biases can be profitably exploited by bookmakers by way of price adjustment (odds shading). The former bias induces bookmakers to shade odds against the domestic team, th...

It is generally thought that competitive equilibrium in sports leagues involves too little competitive balance (the strong dominate the weak too mucha more even contest would be more attractive). However, it is possible to sow in a standard logit contest model that the reverse is true – the strong do not win “enough”i.e. more wins by the strong team would increase attendance or revenues. This i...

This paper develops a new simulation-based measure of playoff uncertainty and investigates its contribution to modelling match attendance compared to other variants of playoff uncertainty in the existing literature. A model of match attendance that incorporates match uncertainty, playoff uncertainty, past home-team performance and other relevant control variables is fitted to Australian Nationa...

This paper provides an empirical examination of the economic impact of spectator sports on local economies. Confirming the results of other ex post analyses of sports in general, this paper finds no statistically significant evidence that college football games in particular contribute positively to a host’s economy. Our analysis from 1970-2004 of 63 metropolitan areas that play host to big-tim...

It is well known that non-cognitive skills are an important determinant of success in life. However, their returns are not simple to measure and, as a result, relatively few studies have dealt with this empirical question. We consider sports participation while at school as one way of improving or signalling the individual’s non-cognitive skills endowment. We use four waves of Add Health data t...

Top‐Down vs. Bottom‐Up: The Long‐Term Impact of Government Ideology and Personal Experience on Values This paper studies the long‐term impact of societal socialization on values using the example of doping behavior in sports. We apply the German Reunification Approach to the microcosm of Berlin and exploit its 40‐year long division into a capitalist and a communist sector. We deliberately chose...

Savings and Prize-Linked Savings Accounts Many households have insufficient savings to handle moderate and routine consumption shocks. Many of these financially fragile households also have the highest lottery expenditures as a proportion of income. This combination suggests that Prize-Linked Savings (PLS) accounts, that combine principal-security with lottery-type jackpots, can increase saving...

The crossing number, cr(G), of a graph G is the least number of crossing points in any drawing of G in the plane. According to the Crossing Lemma of Ajtai, Chvátal, Newborn, Szemerédi [ACNS82] and Leighton [L83], the crossing number of any graph with n vertices and e > 4n edges is at least constant times e/n. Apart from the value of the constant, this bound cannot be improved. We establish some...

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) acts as a cartel with monopsony power in the market for student-athletes. This paper models the demand for student-athlete labor using a Mill-Edgeworth-Marshall reciprocal demand model. The reciprocal demand translates into a supply of violations (or cheating) on the NCAA cartel agreement. A theoretical foundation for this simultaneous system ...